Annemiek Hammer

What children with hearing loss teach us about the interface between (oral) language and speech perception

Speech-in-noise perception builds on a complex interplay between a listener’s linguistic competence, their cognitive resources (e.g. working memory) and, of course, their hearing ability. It is an important aspect of human communication as noise is omnipresent in many aspects of daily life. When listening to speech against a background of noise, a normal hearing adult listener seemingly effortlessly fills in the gaps in the speech signal based on their linguistic knowledge. In this respect, from childhood to adulthood, individuals with hearing loss face at least a double challenge. A first challenge is acquiring spoken language based on a qualitatively degraded speech signal. In my presentation, I will present results on language outcomes in young children who are deaf by means of analyzing their spontaneous speech. A second challenge is to put their linguistic skills into play to understand speech in unfavorable conditions, for instance in a noisy classroom. Here, I will focus on young adults, presenting the results of an experiment through which I assessed the ability of high school students with hearing loss to understand complex language when presented in noise. I will close my presentation with a running experiment on how audiovisual speech input might aid speech perception in difficult listening situations.