Development of a Paediatric Audiovisual Speech Test in Noise

Abstract

There is a trend in the UK to push towards mainstream education for all children with special educational needs, including hearing impaired children with cochlear implants (CI). However, the listening demands of mainstream schools vary considerably as well as the listening abilities of CI users. It is therefore necessary to be able to describe the auditory needs of children with impaired hearing in order to make appropriate decisions regarding school placement and rehabilitation. Since they can vary considerably depending on the environment, signal to noise ratios (SNR) are a significant factor in classroom listening and should be taken into account when making a decision regarding school placement. Furthermore, speech reading is important for some pupils in typical classroom situations whereas some other children are unable to make use of it. The importance of audiovisual speech integration in the communication of children with cochlear implants (CI) may sometimes be underestimated. There are not many tools available to assess lip-reading abilities. The objective of this work was to develop a paediatric audiovisual speech test in noise (PAVT) to 1) be able to evaluate the benefit obtained from adding lip-reading information to auditory signal; 2) fill the gap of valid and reliable tests to inform education services as to the provision required for CI children. The aim was to obtain a test with a high face validity and high reliability, suitable for children with low language levels and rapid to complete.