Age-Related Performance on Vowel Identification and the Spectral-temporally Modulated Ripple Test in Children With Normal Hearing and With Cochlear Implants

Abstract

Children’s performance on psychoacoustic tasks improves with age, but inadequate auditory input may delay this maturation. Cochlear implant (CI) users receive a degraded auditory signal with reduced frequency resolution compared with normal, acoustic hearing; thus, immature auditory abilities may contribute to the variation among pediatric CI users’ speech recognition scores. This study investigated relationships between age-related variables, spectral resolution, and vowel identification scores in prelingually deafened, early-implanted children with CIs compared with normal hearing (NH) children. All participants performed vowel identification and the Spectral-temporally Modulated Ripple Test (SMRT). Vowel stimuli for NH children were vocoded to simulate the reduced spectral resolution of CI hearing. Age positively predicted NH children’s vocoded vowel identification scores, but time with the CI was a stronger predictor of vowel recognition and SMRT performance of children with CIs. For both groups, SMRT thresholds were related to vowel identification performance, analogous to previous findings in adults. Sequential information analysis of vowel feature perception indicated greater transmission of duration-related information compared with formant features in both groups of children. In addition, the amount of F2 information transmitted predicted SMRT thresholds in children with NH and with CIs. Comparisons between the two CIs of bilaterally implanted children revealed disparate task performance levels and information transmission values within the same child. These findings indicate that adequate auditory experience contributes to auditory perceptual abilities of pediatric CI users. Further, factors related to individual CIs may be more relevant to psychoacoustic task performance than are the overall capabilities of the child.

High- and Low-Performing Adult Cochlear Implant Users on High-Variability Sentence Recognition: Differences in Auditory Spectral Resolution and Neurocognitive Functioning

“…Spectral resolution was the primary contributor to the discriminant function. HiPRESTO users obtained significantly higher (better) SMRT thresholds than the LoPRESTO users, although the SMRT thresholds of the HiPRESTO group should be interpreted with caution, given the potential for spectral distortion of SMRT stimuli with high RPO values when presented through a CI processor (DiNino and Arenberg) 11 . The function of spectral resolution to speech recognition is well established.…”

Effects of Low Frequency Residual Hearing on Music Perception and Psychoacoustic Abilities in Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients

“…Effects of age and maturation were studied previously and it has been suggested that SRD matures at 7 years of age in CI recipients (Horn et al, 2017). This is based not only on chronological age but also on CI age (DiNino and Arenberg, 2018) for congenitally deaf children. Our study sample consisted of children with progressive hearing loss who may develop normal central auditory function regardless of implantation age (Sharma and Dorman, 2006).…”

Harmony Perception in Prelingually Deaf, Juvenile Cochlear Implant Users

“…It should be noted that this increase in performance is also correlated with chronological age at testing and might therefore be due to hearing-independent development of the children. The perception of some complex, music related sounds appears to be related to hearing age rather than chronological age (DiNino and Arenberg, 2018). In the present data, these contributions cannot be separated, since hearing age and age at testing are highly correlated in the present CI participants.…”