Relationship between behavioral infant speech perception and hearing age for children with hearing loss

Abstract

(1) Background: Research has demonstrated that early intervention for children who are hard‐of‐hearing (CHH) facilitates improved language development. Early speech perception abilities may impact CHH outcomes and guide future intervention. The objective of this study was to examine the use of a conditioned head turn (CHT) task as a measure of speech discrimination in CHH using a clinically feasible protocol. (2) Methods: Speech perception was assessed for a consonant and vowel contrast among 57 CHH and 70 children with normal hearing (CNH) aged 5– 17 months using a CHT paradigm. (3) Results: Regardless of hearing status, 74% of CHH and 77% of CNH could discriminate /a‐i/, and 55% of CHH and 56% of CNH could discriminate /ba‐da/. Regression models revealed that both CHH and CNH performed better on /ba‐da/ at 70 dBA compared to 50 dBA. Performance by hearing age showed no speech perception differences for CNH and children with mild hearing loss for either contrast. However, children with hearing losses ≥ 41 dB HL performed significantly poorer than CNH for /a‐i/. (4) Conclusions: This study demonstrates the clinical feasibility of assessing early speech perception in infants with hearing loss and replicates previous findings of speech perception abilities among CHH and CNH.