Development and Preliminary Evaluation of a Pediatric Spanish–English Speech Perception Task

Abstract

Purpose To develop a task to evaluate children’s English and Spanish speech perception abilities in either noise or competing speech maskers. Methods Eight bilingual Spanish/English and eight age matched monolingual English children (ages 4.9 –16.4 years) were tested. A forced-choice, picture-pointing paradigm was selected for adaptively estimating masked speech reception thresholds. Speech stimuli were spoken by simultaneous bilingual Spanish/English talkers. The target stimuli were thirty disyllabic English and Spanish words, familiar to five-year-olds, and easily illustrated. Competing stimuli included either two-talker English or two-talker Spanish speech (corresponding to target language) and spectrally matched noise. Results For both groups of children, regardless of test language, performance was significantly worse for the two-talker than the noise masker. No difference in performance was found between bilingual and monolingual children. Bilingual children performed significantly better in English than in Spanish in competing speech. For all listening conditions, performance improved with increasing age. Conclusions Results indicate that the stimuli and task are appropriate for speech recognition testing in both languages, providing a more conventional measure of speech-in-noise perception as well as a measure of complex listening. Further research is needed to determine performance for Spanish-dominant listeners and to evaluate the feasibility of implementation into routine clinical use.

Effect of response context and masker type on word recognition in school-age children and adults

“…For children with hearing loss, speech recognition evaluated in a two-talker masker is a better predictor of real-world listening difficulties, as assessed by parental report, than performance in noise (Hillock-Dunn et al, 2015). A number of speech perception tests appropriate for use in children include speech maskers, some evaluating masked word recognition with a forced-choice response (Litovsky, 2005;Calandruccio et al, 2014), and others evaluating masked word or sentence recognition with an openset response (Cameron and Dillon, 2007;Wilson et al, 2010;Holder et al, 2015). Based on the results of the present study, it is possible that interpretation of these test results may be affected differently by the interaction between age, response context, and informational masking.…”

“…The speech-shaped noise masker was a 90-s sample of noise with the same long-term power spectrum as the two-talker masker. These test materials were all used previously by Calandruccio et al (2014) to evaluate word recognition in young school-age children.…”

“…All three talkers, the target talker and the two masker talkers, were young adults who were native speakers of American English. The two masker recordings were equalized in level, and pauses longer than 300 ms were edited out, as described by Calandruccio et al (2014). The speech-shaped noise masker was a 90-s sample of noise with the same long-term power spectrum as the two-talker masker.…”

“…In contrast to verbal responses, picture-pointing responses do not rely on accurate speech production on the part of the listener or accurate scoring on the part of the tester. This can be advantageous when testing children with speech production deficits, such as those associated with hearing loss (Blamey et al, 2001), or when the target speech materials are not in the tester's native language (Calandruccio et al, 2014). Interpretation of open-and closed-set word recognition is complicated by the fact that these tasks rely on different cognitive processes (Sommers et al, 1997;Clopper et al, 2006).…”

Speech recognition in one- and two-talker maskers in school-age children and adults: Development of perceptual masking and glimpsing

“…Stimuli were a subset of those previously used by Calandruccio et al (2014). Targets were 30 disyllabic words (e.g., tiger), spoken by a female talker, with durations of 425-680 ms (mean 550 ms).…”