Dataset Information

Speechreading in Deaf Adults with Cochlear Implants: Evidence for Perceptual Compensation.

ABSTRACT: Previous research has provided evidence for a speechreading advantage in congenitally deaf adults compared to hearing adults. A 'perceptual compensation' account of this finding proposes that prolonged early onset deafness leads to a greater reliance on visual, as opposed to auditory, information when perceiving speech which in turn results in superior visual speech perception skills in deaf adults. In the current study we tested whether previous demonstrations of a speechreading advantage for profoundly congenitally deaf adults with hearing aids, or no amplificiation, were also apparent in adults with the same deafness profile but who have experienced greater access to the auditory elements of speech via a cochlear implant (CI). We also tested the prediction that, in line with the perceptual compensation account, receiving a CI at a later age is associated with superior speechreading skills due to later implanted individuals having experienced greater dependence on visual speech information. We designed a speechreading task in which participants viewed silent videos of 123 single words spoken by a model and were required to indicate which word they thought had been said via a free text response. We compared congenitally deaf adults who had received CIs in childhood or adolescence (N = 15) with a comparison group of hearing adults (N = 15) matched on age and education level. The adults with CI showed significantly better scores on the speechreading task than the hearing comparison group. Furthermore, within the group of adults with CI, there was a significant positive correlation between age at implantation and speechreading performance; earlier implantation was associated with lower speechreading scores. These results are both consistent with the hypothesis of perceptual compensation in the domain of speech perception, indicating that more prolonged dependence on visual speech information in speech perception may lead to improvements in the perception of visual speech. In addition our study provides metrics of the 'speechreadability' of 123 words produced in British English: one derived from hearing adults (N = 61) and one from deaf adults with CI (N = 15). Evidence for the validity of these 'speechreadability' metrics come from correlations with visual lexical competition data.

SUBMITTER: Pimperton H

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5294775 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Speechreading in Deaf Adults with Cochlear Implants: Evidence for Perceptual Compensation.

Pimperton Hannah H Ralph-Lewis Amelia A MacSweeney Mairéad M

Frontiers in psychology 20170207

Previous research has provided evidence for a speechreading advantage in congenitally deaf adults compared to hearing adults. A 'perceptual compensation' account of this finding proposes that prolonged early onset deafness leads to a greater reliance on visual, as opposed to auditory, information when perceiving speech which in turn results in superior visual speech perception skills in deaf adults. In the current study we tested whether previous demonstrations of a speechreading advantage for p ...[more]

PMID: 28223951

Similar Datasets

Project description:Music perception of cochlear implants (CI) users is constrained by the absence of salient musical pitch cues crucial for melody identification, but is made possible by timing cues that are largely preserved by current devices. While musical timing cues, including beats and rhythms, are a potential route to music learning, it is not known what extent they are perceptible to CI users in complex sound scenes, especially when pitch and timbral features can co-occur and obscure these musical features. The task at hand, then, becomes one of optimizing the available timing cues for young CI users by exploring ways that they might be perceived and encoded simultaneously across multiple modalities. Accordingly, we examined whether training tasks that engage active music listening through dance might enhance the song identification skills of deaf children with CIs. Nine CI children learned new songs in two training conditions: (a) listening only (auditory learning), and (2) listening and dancing (auditory-motor learning). We examined children's ability to identify original song excerpts, as well as mistuned, and piano versions from a closed-set task. While CI children were less accurate than their normal hearing peers, they showed greater song identification accuracies in versions that preserved the original instrumental beats following learning that engaged active listening with dance. The observed performance advantage is further qualified by a medium effect size, indicating that the gains afforded by auditory-motor learning are practically meaningful. Furthermore, kinematic analyses of body movements showed that CI children synchronized to temporal structures in music in a manner that was comparable to normal hearing age-matched peers. Our findings are the first to indicate that input from CI devices enables good auditory-motor integration of timing cues in child CI users for the purposes of listening and dancing to music. Beyond the heightened arousal from active engagement with music, our findings indicate that a more robust representation or memory of musical timing features was made possible by multimodal processing. Methods that encourage CI children to entrain, or track musical timing with body movements, may be particularly effective in consolidating musical knowledge than methods that engage listening only.

Project description:Purpose: Cochlear implants (CIs) provide reasonable levels of speech recognition quietly, but voice pitch perception is severely impaired in CI users. The central question addressed here relates to how access to acoustic input pre-implantation influences vocal emotion production by individuals with CIs. The objective of this study was to compare acoustic characteristics of vocal emotions produced by prelingually deaf school-aged children with cochlear implants (CCIs) who were implanted at the age of 2 and had no usable hearing before implantation with those produced by children with normal hearing (CNH), adults with normal hearing (ANH), and postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants (ACI) who developed with good access to acoustic information prior to losing their hearing and receiving a CI. Method: A set of 20 sentences without lexically based emotional information was recorded by 13 CCI, 9 CNH, 9 ANH, and 10 ACI, each with a happy emotion and a sad emotion, without training or guidance. The sentences were analyzed for primary acoustic characteristics of the productions. Results: Significant effects of Emotion were observed in all acoustic features analyzed (mean voice pitch, standard deviation of voice pitch, intensity, duration, and spectral centroid). ACI and ANH did not differ in any of the analyses. Of the four groups, CCI produced the smallest acoustic contrasts between the emotions in voice pitch and emotions in its standard deviation. Effects of developmental age (highly correlated with the duration of device experience) and age at implantation (moderately correlated with duration of device experience) were observed, and interactions with the children's sex were also observed. Conclusion: Although prelingually deaf CCI and postlingually deaf ACI are listening to similar degraded speech and show similar deficits in vocal emotion perception, these groups are distinct in their productions of contrastive vocal emotions. The results underscore the importance of access to acoustic hearing in early childhood for the production of speech prosody and also suggest the need for a greater role of speech therapy in this area.

Project description:ObjectiveSelf-esteem is a good predictor of mental health and is crucial for well-being and psychological functioning. It is especially important in situations where there are potential mental health problems, such as in people suffering from hearing loss or total deafness. This study aims to gauge the level of self-esteem in adults with hearing problems, in particular those who, in adulthood, had received a cochlear implant (CI). The subjects had different onset (pre-lingual/post-lingual) and amount (deafness/partial deafness) of hearing loss, and their current level of self-esteem was compared to that of the general population. The association of self-esteem with other deafness-related variables (e.g. satisfaction with their CI or whether they also used a hearing aid) and sociodemographic factors was also investigated.MethodsData were obtained from questionnaires mailed to patients who, when adult, had received a CI. The subjects were divided into four subgroups: subjects with pre-lingual deafness, post-lingual deafness, pre-lingual partial deafness, and post-lingual partial deafness. To evaluate their self-esteem, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) was used. For data on sociodemographic status and information related to deafness and CI, we used our own Information Inquiry form. For statistical analysis of the results, we compared means (t-test, ANOVA), investigated correlations, and applied linear regression.ResultsThe self-esteem of deaf and partially deaf CI users was significantly lower than in the general population, especially for post-lingually deafened subjects. The only factor related to deafness and CIs that explained self-esteem was self-rated satisfaction with the CI-meaning that higher satisfaction was associated with higher self-esteem. The major sociodemographic factor that explained self-esteem was marital/partnership status (being in a relationship was helpful). Also men had higher self-esteem than women. Those with higher levels of education, and those working or studying, had higher self-esteem than those who did not. RSES was found to have a single-factor structure.ConclusionDeafness and partial deafness appear to be risk factors for lower self-esteem, a finding that rehabilitation, medical, educational, and employment communities should be made aware of. Medical intervention in the form of a CI supplies the person with improved hearing, but it is not a panacea: their self-esteem is still vulnerable, and reinforcement of self-esteem is an aspect that professionals should focus on. Psychological, psycho-educational, and psychotherapeutic interventions have important roles to play for CI recipients.

Project description:A great deal of variability exists in the speech-recognition abilities of postlingually deaf adult cochlear implant (CI) recipients. A number of previous studies have shown that duration of deafness is a primary factor affecting CI outcomes; however, there is little agreement regarding other factors that may affect performance. The objective of the present study was to determine the source of variability in CI outcomes by examining three main factors, biographic/audiologic information, electrode position within the cochlea, and cognitive abilities in a group of newly implanted CI recipients.Participants were 114 postlingually deaf adults with either the Cochlear or Advanced Bionics CI systems. Biographic/audiologic information, aided sentence-recognition scores, a high resolution temporal bone CT scan and cognitive measures were obtained before implantation. Monosyllabic word recognition scores were obtained during numerous test intervals from 2 weeks to 2 years after initial activation of the CI. Electrode position within the cochlea was determined by three-dimensional reconstruction of pre- and postimplant CT scans. Participants' word scores over 2 years were fit with a logistic curve to predict word score as a function of time and to highlight 4-word recognition metrics (CNC initial score, CNC final score, rise time to 90% of CNC final score, and CNC difference score).Participants were divided into six outcome groups based on the percentile ranking of their CNC final score, that is, participants in the bottom 10% were in group 1; those in the top 10% were in group 6. Across outcome groups, significant relationships from low to high performance were identified. Biographic/audiologic factors of age at implantation, duration of hearing loss, duration of hearing aid use, and duration of severe-to-profound hearing loss were significantly and inversely related to performance as were frequency modulated tone, sound-field threshold levels obtained with the CI. That is, the higher-performing outcome groups were younger in age at the time of implantation, had shorter duration of severe-to-profound hearing loss, and had lower CI sound-field threshold levels. Significant inverse relationships across outcome groups were also observed for electrode position, specifically the percentage of electrodes in scala vestibuli as opposed to scala tympani and depth of insertion of the electrode array. In addition, positioning of electrode arrays closer to the modiolar wall was positively correlated with outcome. Cognitive ability was significantly and positively related to outcome; however, age at implantation and cognition were highly correlated. After controlling for age, cognition was no longer a factor affecting outcomes.There are a number of factors that limit CI outcomes. They can act singularly or collectively to restrict an individual's performance and to varying degrees. The highest performing CI recipients are those with the least number of limiting factors. Knowledge of when and how these factors affect performance can favorably influence counseling, device fitting, and rehabilitation for individual patients and can contribute to improved device design and application.

Dataset Information

Speechreading in Deaf Adults with Cochlear Implants: Evidence for Perceptual Compensation.

Publications

Speechreading in Deaf Adults with Cochlear Implants: Evidence for Perceptual Compensation.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets