Coordination of gaze and speech in communication between children with hearing impairment and normal-hearing peers

Communicative Competence of Oral Deaf Children While Explaining Game Rules

Classrooms are characterized by interactions in a range of genres. The concise language required by expository interactions can be challenging for children who have atypical language, including children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). This study compared the way three groups of upper primary school students (aged 8-13 years) taught a peer to play a new unfamiliar board game: (a) DHH "experts" teaching a "novice" hearing peer; (b) hearing experts teaching a DHH novice; and (c) a hearing expert teaching a hearing novice. All DHH students were enrolled in mainstream schools and used spoken language as the main mode of communication. All three groups were able to convey game rules and purpose, and navigate clarifications. Differences emerged in the accuracy of the use of referents when instructing their peers how to play the game. The specific content vocabulary and the need to emphasize new concise information also challenged the DHH children. This study highlights the importance of including expository tasks in language support and intervention for children who are DHH.

Looking Behavior and Audiovisual Speech Understanding in Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Mild Bilateral or Unilateral Hearing Loss

OBJECTIVES

Visual information from talkers facilitates speech intelligibility for listeners when audibility is challenged by environmental noise and hearing loss. Less is known about how listeners actively process and attend to visual information from different talkers in complex multi-talker environments. This study tracked looking behavior in children with normal hearing (NH), mild bilateral hearing loss (MBHL), and unilateral hearing loss (UHL) in a complex multi-talker environment to examine the extent to which children look at talkers and whether looking patterns relate to performance on a speech-understanding task. It was hypothesized that performance would decrease as perceptual complexity increased and that children with hearing loss would perform more poorly than their peers with NH. Children with MBHL or UHL were expected to demonstrate greater attention to individual talkers during multi-talker exchanges, indicating that they were more likely to attempt to use visual information from talkers to assist in speech understanding in adverse acoustics. It also was of interest to examine whether MBHL, versus UHL, would differentially affect performance and looking behavior.

DESIGN

Eighteen children with NH, eight children with MBHL, and 10 children with UHL participated (8-12 years). They followed audiovisual instructions for placing objects on a mat under three conditions: a single talker providing instructions via a video monitor, four possible talkers alternately providing instructions on separate monitors in front of the listener, and the same four talkers providing both target and nontarget information. Multi-talker background noise was presented at a 5 dB signal-to-noise ratio during testing. An eye tracker monitored looking behavior while children performed the experimental task.

RESULTS

Behavioral task performance was higher for children with NH than for either group of children with hearing loss. There were no differences in performance between children with UHL and children with MBHL. Eye-tracker analysis revealed that children with NH looked more at the screens overall than did children with MBHL or UHL, though individual differences were greater in the groups with hearing loss. Listeners in all groups spent a small proportion of time looking at relevant screens as talkers spoke. Although looking was distributed across all screens, there was a bias toward the right side of the display. There was no relationship between overall looking behavior and performance on the task.

CONCLUSIONS

The present study examined the processing of audiovisual speech in the context of a naturalistic task. Results demonstrated that children distributed their looking to a variety of sources during the task, but that children with NH were more likely to look at screens than were those with MBHL/UHL. However, all groups looked at the relevant talkers as they were speaking only a small proportion of the time. Despite variability in looking behavior, listeners were able to follow the audiovisual instructions and children with NH demonstrated better performance than children with MBHL/UHL. These results suggest that performance on some challenging multi-talker audiovisual tasks is not dependent on visual fixation to relevant talkers for children with NH or with MBHL/UHL.

Working memory and referential communication-multimodal aspects of interaction between children with sensorineural hearing impairment and normal hearing peers

Whereas the language development of children with sensorineural hearing impairment (SNHI) has repeatedly been shown to differ from that of peers with normal hearing (NH), few studies have used an experimental approach to investigate the consequences on everyday communicative interaction. This mini review gives an overview of a range of studies on children with SNHI and NH exploring intra- and inter-individual cognitive and linguistic systems during communication. Over the last decade, our research group has studied the conversational strategies of Swedish speaking children and adolescents with SNHI and NH using referential communication, an experimental analog to problem-solving in the classroom. We have established verbal and non-verbal control and validation mechanisms, related to working memory capacity and phonological short term memory. We present main findings and future directions relevant for the field of cognitive hearing science and for the clinical and school-based management of children and adolescents with SNHI.