Speech Perception Development Research Articles

Speech Perception and Phonological Representation in 5 to 6 Year-Old Typically Developing Children

Objectives: This study aimed to examine the development of speech perception and phonological representation in typically developing children aged 5-6 years. It also explored the relationship between receptive vocabulary, consonant accuracy, nonword repetition performance, and speech perception and phonological representation. Methods: The study involved 77 typically developing children aged 5-6 years. The speech perception identification tasks included minimal pairs that reflected developmental error patterns. The phonological representation judgment tasks involved manipulating consonants and vowels, as well as the number of distinctive features, to examine performance differences under various speech sound manipulation conditions. Results: Performance on both speech perception and phonological representation tasks significantly increased with age. There were also significant differences in performance based on speech sound manipulation conditions. Specifically, in the speech perception task, performance was significantly higher when items focused on the stopping of fricatives rather than the fronting of velars. In the phonological representation task, performance was significantly better in vowel manipulation compared to consonant manipulation, and with two distinctive feature manipulations compared to one. Speech perception tasks showed a significant correlation only with receptive vocabulary, whereas phonological representation tasks showed significant positive correlations with receptive vocabulary, consonant accuracy, and nonword repetition performance. Conclusion: The study confirms that speech perception and phonological representation are developing between ages 5 and 6 in typically developing children. It also suggests that speech perception and phonological representation develop through a complex interplay with speech production abilities and receptive vocabulary.

Neural processing of speech sounds at premature and term birth: ERPs and MMR between 32 and 42 weeks of gestation

Prenatal listening experience reportedly modulates how humans process speech at birth, but little is known about how speech perception develops throughout the perinatal period. The present experiment assessed the neural event-related potentials (ERP) and mismatch responses (MMR) to native vowels in 99 neonates born between 32 and 42 weeks of gestation. The vowels elicited reliable ERPs in newborns whose gestational age at time of experiment was at least 36 weeks and 1 day (36 + 1). The ERPs reflected spectral distinctions between vowel onsets from age 36 weeks + 6 days and durational distinctions at vowel offsets from age 37 weeks + 6 days. Starting at age 40 + 4, there was evidence of neural discrimination of vowel length, indexed by a negative MMR response. The present findings extend our understanding of the earliest stages of speech perception development in that they pinpoint the ages at which the cortex reliably responds to the phonetic characteristics of individual speech sounds and discriminates a native phoneme contrast. The age at which the brain reliably differentiates vowel onsets coincides with what is considered term age in many countries (37 weeks + 0 days of gestational age). Future studies should investigate to what extent the perinatal maturation of the cortical responses to speech sounds is modulated by the ambient language.

THE BENEFITS OF EARLY COCHLEAR IMPLANTATION FOR SPEECH DEVELOPMENT IN CHILDREN WITH USHER SYNDROME: LITERATURE REVIEW

IntroductionUsher syndrome (USH) is a rare autosomal recessive genetic disorder characterized by sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), vision loss (retinitis pigmentosa), and occasional balance impairment. Depending on the severity and onset of hearing loss and coexisting vestibular dysfunction, USH is divided into three clinical types – USH1, USH2, USH3 – as well as atypical USH which combines features of all these three. The purpose of this review is to present the impact of cochlear implantation on speech development in children diagnosed with all types of Usher syndrome.Material and methodsAll relevant publications published in from 2013 to 2023 were retrieved from PubMed based on the keywords <i>Usher syndrome</i>, <i>Usher syndrome diagnostics</i>, <i>Usher syndrome hearing loss</i>, <i>Usher syndrome cochlear</i>, and <i>Usher syndrome speech</i>. Exactly 67 papers were selected.ResultsBilateral cochlear implantation in children with Usher syndrome is beneficial for audiological and verbal development provided that hearing loss is detected early and implantation done promptly. In USH1 the preferred age is before 3 in the case of severe to profound congenital SNHL; in USH2 and USH3 the optimal time for implantation is hampered by the difficulty of estimating when hearing loss occurred and its rate of progression. After bilateral cochlear implantation, studies showed improvements in the categories of auditory performance (CAP), speech intelligibility rate (SIR), meaningful auditory integration scale (MAIS), meaningful use of speech scale (MUSS), and speech reception score (SRS), together with good development of speech perception and verbal communication.ConclusionsEarly diagnosis (before the onset of vision loss) and early bilateral cochlear implantation in children who have suffered severe to profound SNHL due to Usher syndrome reduces disability and maximizes auditory–oral communication skills, significantly increasing their quality of life.

Assessing the role of auditory access in infancy

Even with the widespread adoption of newborn hearing screening and Early Hearing Detection and Intervention systems, infants who are hard-of-hearing (IHH) remain at increased risk for poor or delayed development of auditory and speech perception skills. Speech perception is positively correlated with better auditory development on functional auditory skills and a variety of language outcomes. However, clinical utilization of speech perception tests has not been broadly accepted. One clinically viable tool to assess speech perception during infancy is our electroencephalography (EEG) procedure, which has been validated as an objective measure of speech discrimination. However, we have not examined the development of infant speech perception among IHH and infants with normal hearing (INH). Perceptual attunement—or “narrowing”—is a model of perceptual learning that posits that perceptual abilities are shaped by environmental experiences over the first year of life. Here, we describe our adapted EEG methods to examine the development of infant speech perception to study periods of perceptual attunement between IHH and INH. Preliminary findings confirm that at 3 months of age, infants demonstrate neural encoding of native and non-native speech sounds, and at 6 months of age results suggest a decrease in non-native speech sound encoding.

The development of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children: Evidence from the McGurk paradigm.

The developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children remains understudied. This cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 3- to 4-year-old, 5- to 6-year-old, 7- to 8-year-old children, and adults from Xiamen, China (n = 87, 44 males) investigated this issue using the McGurk paradigm with three levels of auditory noise. For the identification of congruent stimuli, 3- to 4-year-olds underperformed older groups whose performances were comparable. For the perception of the incongruent stimuli, a developmental shift was observed as 3- to 4-year-olds made significantly more audio-dominant but fewer audiovisual-integrated responses to incongruent stimuli than older groups. With increasing auditory noise, the difference between children and adults widened in identifying congruent stimuli but narrowed in perceiving incongruent ones. The findings regarding noise effects agree with the statistically optimal hypothesis.

Cochlear Implantation in Children with Auditory Neuropathy: Meta-Analysis

Plain Language SummaryAuditory neuropathy (AN) is associated with fluctuations in rates of speech discrimination. With respect to treatment, we have variable results in the literature about development of speech perception and skills, in children with AN and cochlear implant (CI) rehabilitation. To compare their results with sensorineural hearing loss children due to other causes was the objective of this study, which was performed a systematic literature review with meta-analysis that shown there was no evidence allowing the conclusion that the two groups were different from each other about results in speech performance after 1 year of CI placement. So, this study demonstrated that CI provides the comparable benefit to children with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder in comparison to children with neurosensory hearing loss associated with other causes in their speech development.

Exploring audiovisual speech perception in monolingual and bilingual children in Uzbekistan

This study aimed to investigate the development of audiovisual speech perception in monolingual Uzbek-speaking and bilingual Uzbek–Russian-speaking children, focusing on the impact of language experience on audiovisual speech perception and the role of visual phonetic (i.e., mouth movements corresponding to phonetic/lexical information) and temporal (i.e., timing of speech signals) cues. A total of 321 children aged 4 to 10 years in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, discriminated /ba/ and /da/ syllables across three conditions: auditory-only, audiovisual phonetic (i.e., sound accompanied by mouth movements), and audiovisual temporal (i.e., sound onset/offset accompanied by mouth opening/closing). Effects of modality (audiovisual phonetic, audiovisual temporal, or audio-only cues), age, group (monolingual or bilingual), and their interactions were tested using a Bayesian regression model. Overall, older participants performed better than younger participants. Participants performed better in the audiovisual phonetic modality compared with the auditory modality. However, no significant difference between monolingual and bilingual children was observed across all modalities. This finding stands in contrast to earlier studies. We attribute the contrasting findings of our study and the existing literature to the cross-linguistic similarity of the language pairs involved. When the languages spoken by bilinguals exhibit substantial linguistic similarity, there may be an increased necessity to disambiguate speech signals, leading to a greater reliance on audiovisual cues. The limited phonological similarity between Uzbek and Russian might have minimized bilinguals’ need to rely on visual speech cues, contributing to the lack of group differences in our study.

The role of attention in the development of speech perception

The role of attention in the development of speech perception

Exploring the impact hearing differences have on the development of speech perception during infancy

Early periods of perceptual skill development are driven by the dynamic interplay between language experiences and maturation of auditory sensory pathways. Among infants with normal hearing (INH), the first year of life is a seminal period for refining speech perception abilities shaped by exposure to language. Research suggests that refinement of speech discrimination abilities depends on an infant’s exposure to speech sounds, thus infants who are hard-of-hearing (IHH) are susceptible to atypical development during this period. Currently, the impact of inconsistent auditory cue access on development of speech perception is unknown among IHH. To investigate this, our lab has employed both electroencephalography (EEG) and a conditioned head turn (CHT) paradigm to examine auditory cue access and speech perception abilities, respectively, over the first year of life. We will provide a broad overview of our recent and continuing work among IHH and INH using EEG and CHT findings which suggest: (1) early EEG measures of cue access predict later behavioral speech perception abilities, (2) hearing age (duration of time between hearing aid fitting and testing) is related to speech perception abilities measured by CHT, and (3) a significant relationship between infant speech perception and both spoken expressive and receptive language abilities.

Development of speech perception in noise: Neural correlates of stream segregation in children and adolescents

In noisy backgrounds, listeners perform the auditory scene analysis: they parse the different auditory streams (“stream segregation”), and selectively focus on one stream as it unfolds over time (“selective attention”). Auditory scene analysis is thought to mature slowly. Here, we sought to investigate developmental changes in the neural signature of auditory stream segregation. Children (n = 17, aged 8 to 17) and young adults (n = 10) were presented with sequences of sounds consisting in stochastic variations of figures and backgrounds. These figure-ground sequences have been shown to elicit distinct “signature” EEG responses, including the object-related negativity (ORN) and P400, which reflect the processing concurrent auditory objects. Participants were also presented with a consonant identification task, where the consonant was presented in quiet, in the presence of one interfering talker, and in the presence of speech-shaped-noise. Preliminary results indicate a developmental effect on figure-ground segregation. Interestingly, we observe a significant correlation (r = 0.45) between stream segregation and speech perception in noise. However, we do not observe a developmental effect on the ORN/P400. Results will be discussed in light with the literature on the topic of auditory scene analysis and the development of the central auditory pathways.

Impact of Cochlear Implants (CIs) in Prelingual Deaf Children: A Synthesis of Available Evidences

ABSTRACT Background: Profound hearing loss during childhood impacts the normal development of auditory and speech perception and language skills. Cochlear implants (CIs) have revolutionized the scenario of rehabilitation of profoundly deaf individuals, particularly the prelingual deaf. A prelingual deaf is congenitally deaf or has hearing loss before speech development. Objective: To perform a scoping review of available evidence for assessing the effects of CIs in prelingual deaf children on their auditory and speech perception and language development. Materials and Methods: A scoping review of research studies assessing the effects of CIs in prelingually deaf children was carried out in June 2022 using major databases such as PubMed, Medline, Scopus, and Web of Science using appropriate keywords. To be included in the review, the studies were required to be full-text articles in the English language only, and the studies on adult populations were excluded. All the relevant studies found to be suitable for inclusion were classified under three subheadings: “Impact on Auditory perception,” “Impact on Speech perception and/or development,” and “Impact on “Language development.” Conclusion: CIs are a highly effective intervention in the treatment and rehabilitation of prelingually deaf children, although complex due to the interaction of variables that affect the implanted child’s performance. The factors found to influence it are the child’s age at the time of implantation, time of hearing sensorial deprivation, duration of use of a cochlear implant, and type of speech codification strategy used. More well-designed longitudinal studies with greater follow-up periods post-implantation are required to better understand the implantation complexity and its impact on prelingual deaf children.

Percepção da fala e linguagem de crianças com espectro da neuropatia auditiva: revisão sistemática da literatura

ABSTRACT Purpose: to analyze the test results of speech perception and spoken language in children with hearing loss and auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, users of hearing aids or cochlear implants. Methods: a systematic review of the literature based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Consultation was performed in databases, considering studies from 1996 to 2021, selecting the studies that presented the results of speech perception or spoken language in children with bilateral auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, with no structural alterations of the ear and/or vestibulocochlear nerve, or other associated impairments. Descriptive analysis was performed. Literature Review: among 1,422 studies found, 15 were included. Variability in the sample size, types of studies, evaluation procedures and methodological questions were observed. The cochlear implants and hearing aids contributed to the development of speech perception and spoken language in children with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, since skills such as auditory comprehension and speech intelligibility, were achieved. Conclusion: 15 studies suggest that cochlear implants and hearing aids may be effective for speech perception and spoken language development in children with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder, with no other associated impairments. The need for further research with a high methodological rigor is highlighted.

A 3-Year Follow-Up and Radiological Analysis of Cochlear Implantation Patients with Cochlear Nerve Deficiency and Modiolar Deficiency-Type Malformations.

Cochlear nerve deficiency (CND) is often combined with modiolar deficiency-type inner ear malformations, which cause variable cochlear implantation (CI) outcomes. We aimed to assess the postoperative development of auditory and speech perception in CND patients with modiolar deficiency-type malformations after 3 years of follow-up to determine the factors correlated with CI outcomes. Sixty-seven CND patients with modiolar deficiency-type malformations who underwent CI surgery were retrospectively reviewed. Modiolar deficiency-type malformations included common cavity (CC), cochlear hypoplasia (CH) (including CH-I and CH-II) and incomplete partition-I (IP-I). Categorical auditory performance (CAP) and the infant-toddler meaningful auditory integration scale (MAIS) were used to assess auditory ability. The speech intelligibility rating (SIR) and meaningful use of speech scale (MUSS) were used to assess the speech intelligibility of these CI patients. The CI outcomes were evaluated at 0, 12, 24 and 36 months after implant activation. All patients demonstrated improvements in auditory ability and speech intelligibility after CI. There were no significant differences in CI outcomes at any time point according to the malformation type. The number of nerve bundles within the internal auditory canal (IAC) showed significant differences at 12, 24 and 36 months after CI ( p < 0.05). Patients with one nerve bundle had relatively poor CI outcomes. CND patients with modiolar deficiency-type malformations showed continuous improvement in auditory and speech abilities after CI. Compared with malformations, the number of nerve bundles should be given more attention when selecting the side for CI.

Development of categorical speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children and adolescents.

Although children develop categorical speech perception at a very young age, the maturation process remains unclear. A cross-sectional study in Mandarin-speaking 4-, 6-, and 10-year-old children, 14-year-old adolescents, and adults (n=104, 56 males, all Asians from mainland China) was conducted to investigate the development of categorical perception of four Mandarin phonemic contrasts: lexical tone contrast Tone 1-2, vowel contrast /u/-/i/, consonant aspiration contrast /p/-/ph /, and consonant formant transition contrast /p/-/t/. The results indicated that different types of phonemic contrasts, and even the identification and discrimination of the same phonemic contrast, matured asynchronously. The observation that tone and vowel perception are achieved earlier than consonant perception supports the phonological saliency hypothesis.

Longitudinal trajectories of electrophysiological mismatch responses in infant speech discrimination differ across speech features

Infants rapidly advance in their speech perception, electrophysiologically reflected in the transition from an immature, positive-going to an adult-like, negative-going mismatch response (MMR) to auditory deviancy. Although the MMR is a common tool to study speech perception development, it is not yet completely understood how different speech contrasts affect the MMR’s characteristics across development. Thus, a systematic longitudinal investigation of the MMR’s maturation depending on speech contrast is necessary. We here longitudinally explored the maturation of the infant MMR to four critical speech contrasts: consonant, vowel, vowel-length, and pitch. MMRs were obtained when infants (n = 58) were 2, 6 and 10 months old. To evaluate the maturational trajectory of MMRs, we applied second-order latent growth curve models. Results showed positive-going MMR amplitudes to all speech contrasts across all assessment points that decreased over time towards an adult-like negativity. Notably, the developmental trajectories of speech contrasts differed, implying that infant speech perception matures with different rates and trajectories throughout the first year, depending on the studied auditory feature. Our results suggest that stimulus-dependent maturational trajectories need to be considered when drawing conclusions about infant speech perception development reflected by the infant MMR.

Effect of infant bilingualism on audiovisual integration in a McGurk task

Infants growing up in an environment where more than one language is spoken tend to follow the early milestones of early language development. This is an impressive achievement given that they are learning two languages while receiving reduced exposure to each of these languages compared with monolingual infants. This increased variability in their linguistic environment may lead to adjustments in the way bilingual infants process visual and auditory speech. This study aimed to clarify the influence of infant bilingualism on the development of audiovisual speech integration. Using eye tracking and a McGurk paradigm, we studied face scanning patterns when 7- to 10-month-old infants were viewing articulation of audiovisually congruent and incongruent syllables. We found that monolingual infants decreased their attention to the mouth and increased their attention to the eyes of speaking faces when presented with incongruent articulation, typically leading to the McGurk illusion during adulthood. In bilingual infants, no differences in face scanning patterns were observed between audiovisually congruent and incongruent articulation, suggesting that the increased variability in their speech experience may lead to more tolerance to articulatory inconsistencies. These results suggest that the development of audiovisual speech perception is influenced by infants’ language environment.

Neurodevelopmental Preparedness for Language in the Neonatal Brain

Neonates show broad-based, universal speech perception abilities, allowing them to acquire any language. Moreover, an increasing body of research shows that prenatal experience with speech, which is a low-pass signal mainly preserving prosody, already shapes those abilities. In this review, we first provide a summary of the empirical evidence available today on newborns’ universal and experience-modulated speech perception abilities. We then interpret these findings in a new framework, focusing on the role of the prenatal prosodic experience in speech perception development. We argue that the chronological sequence of infants’ experience with speech, starting before birth with a low-pass filtered signal and continuing with the full-band signal after birth, sets up the prosodic hierarchy and a cascade of embedded neural oscillations as its brain correlate, laying the foundations for language acquisition. Prosody, constituting infants’ very first experience with language, may thus play a fundamental role in speech perception and language development.

Input quality and speech perception development in bilingual infants' first year of life.

Individual differences in infants' native phonological development have been linked to the quantity and quality of infant-directed speech (IDS). The effects of parental and infant bilingualism on this relation in 131 five- and nine-month-old monolingual and bilingual Spanish and Basque infants (72male; 59 female; from white middle-class background) were investigated. Bilingualism did not affect the developmental trajectory of infants' native and non-native speech perception and the quality of maternal speech. In both language groups, vowel exaggeration in IDS was significantly related to speech perception skills for 9-month-olds (r=-.30), but not for 5-month-olds. This demonstrates that bilingual and monolingual caregivers provide their infants with speech input that assists their task of learning the phonological inventory of one or two languages.

Speech perception and the sensorimotor system in Infancy

The speech that infants perceive and learn from is highly multisensory. Preverbal infants show multisensory speech sensitivities prior to direct associative experience, for instance, even to non-native speech that they have not experienced before. Sensorimotor influences on auditory perception are of increasing interest in the context of speech perception development. In a series of experiments, we explored whether infants’ speech perception is influenced by articulatory-auditory relations. Specifically, we experimentally restricted the movement of infants’ relevant articulators during speech perception tasks. We review a series of studies showing both behavioral (eye-tracking) and neural (EEG) evidence that preverbal infants’ auditory speech perception is influenced by articulatorily specific sensorimotor input at 6- and 3- months of age. To control for the possibility of learning, we tested both native and non-native (hence not visually nor auditorily familiar) phonetic contrasts. To explore whether the auditory-sensorimotor relation is in place even without feedback from self-produced vocalization, we tested consonant discrimination in infants as young as 3-month, who are not yet babbling and are unable to produce consonant sounds. Our results show that the sensorimotor-auditory link is in place prior to specific experience watching, hearing, or producing the relevant sounds.

The development of auditory speech perception and spatial hearing abilities within one year after cochlear implantation in preschool prelingual deaf children

Objective: To investigate the development of auditory speech perception and spatial hearing abilities within one year after cochlear implantation in preschool prelingual deaf children and the relationship between the two abilities. Methods: This retrospective study analyzed 31 preschool children with an average age of (2.3±1.2) years. All cases were assessed at pre-implant, 6 months and 12 months post-implant using the Infant-toddler Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (IT-MAIS), the Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale (MAIS) and the Mandarin Early Speech Perception test (MESP) to evaluate their listening and speech perception abilities, and using the Speech,Spatial,and Other Qualities of Hearing Scale for Parents (SSQ-P) questionnaires to evaluate their speech perception and spatial hearing abilities. SPSS 23.0 was used for the statistical analysis. Results: All children performed better at 6 months and 12 months post-implant with IT-MAIS/MAIS, MESP than pre-implant, and the scoring rate continued to improve, with a significant difference (P<0.01). For the SSQ-P (Speech) and SSQ-P (Spatial) scores, the mean scores of pre-implant were (0.9±0.2) points and (0.8±0.3) points, those of 6 months post-implant were (4.6±0.2) and (2.6±0.3), and 12 months post-implant were (6.2±0.2) and (6.3±0.3), the scores of the two groups were significantly different at pre-implant, 6 months and 12 months post-implant (P<0.01). The growth rate of SSQ-P (Spatial) from pre-implant to 12 months post-implant was 675.3%, and the growth rate from 6 months post-implant to 12 months post-implant was 140.6%, the growth rate showed an significant increase compared with IT-MAIS/MAIS, MESP and SSQ-P (Speech).SSQ-P (Speech) and SSQ-P (Spatial) scores were moderate correlation at 12 months post-implant(r=0.465, P=0.008). Conclusions: Within one year after cochlear implantation, listening, speech perception and spatial hearing abilities of preschool prelingual deaf children could show a comprehensive, continuous and significant progress as the implantation time increasing. The growth rate of spatial hearing is greater than that of speech perception at 12 months post-implant, and the spatial hearing could still show rapid development characteristics after 6 months post-implant.