Daylong acoustic amplitude from the perspective of young children with and without hearing loss

Abstract

Very little is known about the acoustic characteristics of the daylong auditory environment of children, especially for those children who belong to an at-risk population such as those with hearing loss. This work looks at the daylong acoustic amplitude from the auditory perspective of young children. Naturalistic audio was collected from a wearable audio recorder. Amplitude values were collected from 814 daylong recordings from children aged 1–90 months, with 318 from children who are typically developing and 496 from children with mild- to moderate hearing loss. We compared for difference by sex, hearing status, and age. Results suggest that boys’ recordings had higher amplitude than girls’, and that recordings of children with mild- to moderate hearing loss had higher amplitude than children who were typically developing. There were no observed sex by hearing status or sex by age interactions. For the recordings from children with hearing loss amplitude was negatively correlated with age, but for typically developing children amplitude was positively correlated with age. Results may be important for better understanding of children with hearing loss, language and speech development, automatic processing routines (such as automatic speech recognition), and intervention or therapeutic techniques for at risk populations.