A study of the Speech and Environmental Sound Recognition in the Classroom Noise for School-aged Children with Hearing Loss

Abstract

This study aimed to measure accuracy of speech (monosyllables and sentences) and environmental sound recognition in the children with hearing aids (HA, N = 17) or cochlear implants (CI, N = 22) when listening in the classroom noise. Nine normal-hearing children participated as a control group. The classroom noise was recorded either just right before the class or during the break time. All the target sounds were presented at 65 dB SPL, and 5 dB signal-to-noise ratio was used between the target and noise sounds. Additionally, the usage of sign launage, CHAPPS (Children's Auditory Processing Performance Scale), forward/backward digit span, KISE-KIT (Korea Institute for Special Education-Korea Intelligence Test for children), REVT (Receptive and Expressive Vocabulary Test) results were obtained for the purpose of correlational analysis. Three main findings were observed as follows. First, the type of noise significantly affected recognition accuracy of both HA and CI groups. Closed-set environmental sounds were recognized more accurately than sentence or words for both groups. Overall, children who better recognized the environmental sounds were also superior to recognize speech in noise. Second, children with more usage of sign language as well as worse CHAPPS and digit span scores had lower speech recognition performance in noise, regardless the type of stimulus. Third, the environmental sounds having more repetition pattern and longer duration were more easily recognized for both groups. The analysis of word recognition errors showed that, regardless of group and noise type, the common error types were no response, response as different words, and consonant substitution.

Perception of Environmental Sounds in Cochlear Implant Users: A Systematic Review

“…Only one study (Kim and Lee, 2012 ) examined ESI in the presence of background noise, using a fixed 5 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and two types of classroom noises recorded either before the class begins or during the break period. In all other studies, environmental sounds were always presented in quiet.…”

“…For post-lingual adults, identification accuracy ranged between ~33% correct (Strelnikov et al, 2018 ) and 87.5% correct (Kaga and Akamasu, 2009 ). For children with CIs, two studies reported sound identification accuracy of 31.6 and 35.3% (Kim and Lee, 2012 ; Berland et al, 2019 ), while a third study reported 67.6% accuracy (Liu et al, 2013 ). The single study, which focused specifically on pre/perilingual late-implanted adults, reported identification accuracy of 40.5% (Peasgood et al, 2003 ).…”

“…However, if the open set studies are conservatively assigned the value above 60 response options (since all five open set studies reported accuracy which was close to or below that of studies with 60 response options), the rank order correlation magnitude increases to Rho = −0.64 ( p < 0.01). The two outlier studies in Figure 2 with lower accuracy scores obtained on tests with a relatively small number of response options (i.e., 10; Lee and Kim, 2011 ; Kim and Lee, 2012 ) included early deafened participants, some of whom relied primarily on sign language prior to implantation.…”

“…Listeners are usually aware of the environment they are in and can leverage situational context and information from other sensory modalities to optimize PES. However, only one study (Kim and Lee, 2012) has examined environmental sound identification in the presence of background noise, while two studies have assessed the effect of context in sequences of environmental sounds distinguished by their semantic coherence with each other (Shafiro et al, 2016(Shafiro et al, , 2020. Although environmental sound identification does not appear to improve following implantation, CIs may still positively contribute to environmental sound awareness, for example by informing the listener that something is happening in the environment, which may in turn lead to more accurate source identification when supplemented by visual or other contextual cues.…”

“…All studies were published in peer-reviewed journals, except (Kaga and Akamasu, 2009), which was published as a book chapter. Sixteen of the selected studies examined PES in adult CI users and three studies examined PES in children with CIs with congenital or early onset hearing loss (Kim and Lee, 2012;Liu et al, 2013;Berland et al, 2019). Most of the adult CI studies focused on post-lingually implanted adults, with only one of the adult studies (Peasgood et al, 2003) focused exclusively on pre/perilingual CI users.…”