背景:通常通过单词和句子重复或命名测试来测试具有人工耳蜗(CI)的儿童的感知和语音产生能力。然而,这些测试与日常生活语言背景相去甚远。
目标:这里,我们描述了一种研究语言理解和预期言语行为之间联系的方法,以促进使用更复杂的听力情境。
方法:设置包括观看两个演员的视听对话。孩子们的目光从一个说话者切换到另一个说话者,作为他们预测能力的代理。此外,为了更好地理解预期行为的基础和影响,我们还测量了儿童理解对话内容的能力,他们的言语感知和记忆技能以及他们的节奏技能,这也需要时间预测。重要的是,我们比较了有CI表现的儿童和年龄匹配的听力正常(NH)儿童的儿童。
结果:与NH儿童相比,CI儿童的言语感知能力和言语工作记忆能力较差,凝视预期行为没有差异。有趣的是,仅在有CI的儿童中,我们发现对话理解之间存在显著的相关性,感知技能和凝视预期行为。
结论:我们的结果延伸到先前发现的对话背景,显示CI患儿缺乏预测性缺陷。当前的设计似乎是一个有趣的途径,可以在更生态的语言环境中对幼儿的预期语言行为提供准确和客观的估计。
结论:关于这个主题已经知道的内容人工耳蜗的儿童似乎很难从序列输入模式中提取结构和学习,可能是由于生命最初几年的信号退化和听觉剥夺。他们似乎也减少了听力损失儿童对上下文信息的使用和语言处理缓慢。本文对现有知识的补充在这里,我们表明,当采用相当复杂的语言环境,如观看两个人的对话时,植入人工耳蜗的儿童能够使用语音和语言结构来预测即将到来的说话者的视线切换。这项工作的临床意义是什么?本设计似乎是一个有趣的途径,可以在更加生态和动态的语言环境中提供对预期行为的准确和客观的估计。重要的是,这项措施是隐含的,以前曾用于非常年轻(听力正常)的儿童,表明他们在两岁时自发地进行预期的凝视切换。因此,这种方法可能有助于改善人工耳蜗植入后相当早期的言语理解评估,因为明确的行为测试并不总是可靠和敏感的.
BACKGROUND: Perceptual and speech production abilities of children with cochlear implants (CIs) are usually tested by word and sentence repetition or naming tests. However, these tests are quite far apart from daily life linguistic contexts.
OBJECTIVE: Here, we describe a way of investigating the link between language comprehension and anticipatory verbal behaviour promoting the use of more complex listening situations.
METHODS: The setup consists in watching the audio-visual dialogue of two actors. Children\'s gaze switches from one speaker to the other serve as a proxy of their prediction abilities. Moreover, to better understand the basis and the impact of anticipatory behaviour, we also measured children\'s ability to understand the dialogue content, their speech perception and memory skills as well as their rhythmic skills, that also require temporal predictions. Importantly, we compared children with CI performances with those of an age-matched group of children with normal hearing (NH).
RESULTS: While children with CI revealed poorer speech perception and verbal working memory abilities than NH children, there was no difference in gaze anticipatory behaviour. Interestingly, in children with CI only, we found a significant correlation between dialogue comprehension, perceptual skills and gaze anticipatory behaviour.
CONCLUSIONS: Our results extend to a dialogue context of previous findings showing an absence of predictive deficits in children with CI. The current design seems an interesting avenue to provide an accurate and objective estimate of anticipatory language behaviour in a more ecological linguistic context also with young children.
CONCLUSIONS: What is already known on the subject Children with cochlear implants seem to have difficulties extracting structure from and learning sequential input patterns, possibly due to signal degradation and auditory deprivation in the first years of life. They also seem to have a reduced use of contextual information and slow language processing among children with hearing loss. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Here we show that when adopting a rather complex linguistic context such as watching a dialogue of two individuals, children with cochlear implants are able to use the speech and language structure to anticipate gaze switches to the upcoming speaker. What are the clinical implications of this work? The present design seems an interesting avenue to provide an accurate and objective estimate of anticipatory behaviour in a more ecological and dynamic linguistic context. Importantly, this measure is implicit and it has been previously used with very young (normal-hearing) children, showing that they spontaneously make anticipatory gaze switches by age two. Thus, this approach may be of interest to refine the speech comprehension assessment at a rather early age after cochlear implantation where explicit behavioural tests are not always reliable and sensitive.