Speech intelligibility of children with an auditory brainstem implant: a triple-case study

ABSTRACT

Auditory brainstem implantation (ABI) is a relative recent development in paediatric hearing restoration. Consequently, young-implanted children’s productive language has not received much attention. This study investigated speech intelligibility of children with ABI (N = 3) in comparison to children with cochlear implants (CI) and children with typical hearing (TH). Spontaneous speech samples were recorded from children representing the three groups matched on cumulative vocabulary level. Untrained listeners (N = 101) rated the intelligibility of one-word utterances on a continuous scale and transcribed each utterance. The rating task yielded a numerical score between 0 and 100, and similarities and differences between the listeners’ transcriptions were captured by a relative entropy score. The speech intelligibility of children with CI and children with TH was similar. Speech intelligibility of children with ABI was well below that of the children with CI and TH. But whereas one child with ABI’s intelligibility approached that of the control groups with increasing lexicon size, the intelligibility of the two other children with ABI did not develop in a similar direction. Overall, speech intelligibility was only moderate in the three groups of children, with quite low ratings and considerable differences in the listeners’ transcriptions, resulting in high relative entropy scores.

KEYWORDS:

• Auditory brainstem implant
• speech intelligibility
• cochlear implant
• perceptual experiment
• child language

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the children and their parents for participating in this study as well as all listeners to participate in the experiment N. Boonen, I. Molemans, R. van den Berg, L. Van Severen and K. Schauwers for the collection of most video-recordings. We thank L. Swinnen for the RIZIV information about the number of pediatric ABI implantations in Belgium. We thank the reviewers for their valuable suggestions to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation in Flanders (FWO) under grant [12Q6318N];Research Foundation Flanders [12Q6318N];