Speech-in-Noise Recognition in School-Aged Children with Hearing Loss: Evidence of a Critical Condition

Abstract

Previous research findings demonstrated that cochlear implants (CIs) users have essential challenges with speech recognition in the presence of background noise. Therefore, this study aimed to determine speech-in-noise (SiN) perception in Persian school-aged children with CIs/hearing aids (HAs) compared to their peers with normal hearing (NH). The research was administered as a cross-sectional study. Speech-in-noise performance in thirty-three school-aged children with hearing loss (19 unilateral CIs users and 14 bilateral HAs users) was compared to twenty school-aged children with normal hearing by using the Persian Lexical Neighborhood Tests (PLNTs). To make sure that floor or ceiling effects would not affect the children’s performance, the PLNTs were performed by the sound field at different levels of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The SiN performance on all four subscales of the PLNTs was significantly poorer in Persian school-aged CIs/HAs users than their peers with NH for all stepwise increases in the SNR (P < 0.001). The Persian school-aged CIs users experience a critical condition related to listening spectrally degraded speech in noisy environments such as home, school, and classroom due to SiN perception insufficiency.