Reducing Simulated Channel Interaction Reveals Differences in Phoneme Identification Between Children and Adults With Normal Hearing.
Kelly N Jahn, Mishaela DiNino, Julie G Arenberg
PMID 29927780WHAT IT FOUND
Children with normal hearing needed both more channels and less simulated overlap to identify vowels, while adults plateaued earlier.
A small cochlear implant comparison suggested first-implanted child ears performed like children in conditions with less simulated overlap.
Key findings
01Vowel identification improved with age for children with normal hearing, but not for adults.
02For children's vowel identification, steeper filter slopes helped mainly when 12 or 15 channels were available, while adults' vowel scores plateaued at 12 channels.
03In a preliminary comparison, first-implanted child cochlear implant ears performed similarly to normal-hearing children under steeper simulated filter slopes, while second-implanted ears performed similarly to children under shallower slopes.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The main experiment used acoustic vocoder simulations in normal-hearing listeners, not actual cochlear implant stimulation, so it does not directly show how implant programming affects patients. The cochlear implant comparison was preliminary and involved a small number of users who completed the task alongside other experiments. Children did not complete the shallowest 15 dB/octave filter slope condition, so their performance under high simulated channel interaction was not fully tested. One child withdrew before consonant testing, and children with cochlear implants completed vowel testing only, so age and implant comparisons are incomplete. Vowel and consonant stimuli were recorded from different talkers of different genders, so the study did not compare vowels and consonants directly. The normal-hearing adults performed near ceiling in some conditions, and cochlear implant scores were highly variable.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The supplied publication types indicate NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that changing cochlear implant programming improves speech outcomes. The study tested simulated channel interaction in normal-hearing listeners and only made a small, preliminary comparison with implant users, so it does not establish a clinical benefit.