Audiovisual Speech Perception Abilities of Children with Normal Hearing in Quiet and in Noise & Comparison to Participants with Cochlear Implants

Abstract

Previous research suggests that the speech perceptual abilities of children with normal hearing differ from those of children with cochlear implants when auditory and visual information are presented simultaneously. The current study aims to investigate the audiovisual integration abilities of nine children and young people with cochlear implants (aged 6-23 years) and 31 children with normal hearing (aged 7, 11 or 15 years). Participants took part in an audiovisual speech reading assessment and an audiovisual attention task. The audiovisual speech reading task involved listening to and repeating sentences under four different listening conditions; audiovisual, auditory alone, audiovisual+noise and auditory+noise. The audiovisual attention task involved attending to a computer presentation of a sequence of auditory and visual stimuli. For this assessment the participants were required to click the mouse whenever he/she 'heard' or 'saw' the target '1'. For the speech reading task, the addition of visual cues was beneficial for speech perception in ideal listening conditions for both groups. Interestingly the presence of visual cues was neither beneficial nor detrimental to speech perception in poor listening conditions for both groups. The presence of noise had a detrimental affect on the speech perceptual abilities of both groups.