"Minimal" High-Frequency Hearing Loss and School-Age Children

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the consonant and vowel identification abilities of 12 children with minimal high-frequency hearing loss, 12 children with normal hearing, and 12 young adults with normal hearing using nonsense syllables recorded in a classroom with reverberation time of 0.7 s in two conditions of: (1) quiet and (2) noise (+13 dB S/N against a multi-talker babble). The young adults achieved significantly higher mean consonant and vowel identification scores than both groups of children. The children with normal hearing had significantly higher mean consonant identification scores in quiet than the children with minimal high-frequency hearing loss, but the groups performances did not differ in noise. Further, the two groups of children did not differ in vowel identification performance. Listeners’ responses to consonant stimuli were converted to confusion matrices and submitted to a sequential information analysis (SINFA, Wang & Bilger, 1973). The SINFA determined that the amount of information transmitted, both overall and for individual features, differed as a function of listener group ad listening condition.