Browsing by Author "Houston, Derek M."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Effects of congenital hearing loss and cochlear implantation on audiovisual speech perception in infants and children
    (IOS Press, 2010) Bergeson, Tonya R.; Houston, Derek M.; Miyamoto, Richard T.; Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery, School of Medicine
    Purpose Cochlear implantation has recently become available as an intervention strategy for young children with profound hearing impairment. In fact, infants as young as 6 months are now receiving cochlear implants (CIs), and even younger infants are being fitted with hearing aids (HAs). Because early audiovisual experience may be important for normal development of speech perception, it is important to investigate the effects of a period of auditory deprivation and amplification type on multimodal perceptual processes of infants and children. The purpose of this study was to investigate audiovisual perception skills in normal-hearing (NH) infants and children and deaf infants and children with CIs and HAs of similar chronological ages. Methods We used an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to present the same woman’s face articulating two words (“judge” and “back”) in temporal synchrony on two sides of a TV monitor, along with an auditory presentation of one of the words. Results The results showed that NH infants and children spontaneously matched auditory and visual information in spoken words; deaf infants and children with HAs did not integrate the audiovisual information; and deaf infants and children with CIs initially did not initially integrate the audiovisual information but gradually matched the auditory and visual information in spoken words. Conclusions These results suggest that a period of auditory deprivation affects multimodal perceptual processes that may begin to develop normally after several months of auditory experience.
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    Factors Affecting Speech Discrimination in Children with Cochlear Implants: Evidence from Early-Implanted Infants
    (American Academy of Audiology, 2016-06) Phan, Jennifer; Houston, Derek M.; Ruffin, Chad; Ting, Jonathan; Holt, Rachael Frush; Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery, School of Medicine
    Background To learn words and acquire language, children must be able to discriminate and correctly perceive phonemes. Although there has been much research on the general language outcomes of children with cochlear implants (CIs), little is known about the development of speech perception with regard to specific speech processes, such as speech discrimination. Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of speech discrimination in infants with CIs and identify factors that might correlate with speech discrimination skills. Research Design Using a Hybrid Visual Habituation procedure, we tested infants with CIs on their ability to discriminate the vowel contrast /i/-/u/. We also gathered demographic and audiological information about each infant. Study Sample Children who had received CIs before 2 yr of age served as participants. We tested the children at two post cochlear implantation intervals: 2–4 weeks post CI stimulation (N = 17) and 6–9 mo post CI stimulation (N = 10). Data Collection and Analysis The infants’ mean looking times during the novel versus old trials of the experiment were measured. A linear regression model was used to evaluate the relationship between the normalized looking time difference and the following variables: chronological age, age at CI stimulation, gender, communication mode, and best unaided pure-tone average. Results We found that the best unaided pure-tone average predicted speech discrimination at the early interval. In contrast to some previous speech perception studies that included children implanted before 3 yr of age, age at CI stimulation did not predict speech discrimination performance. Conclusions The results suggest that residual acoustic hearing before implantation might facilitate speech discrimination during the early period post cochlear implantation; with more hearing experience, communication mode might have a greater influence on the ability to discriminate speech. This and other studies on age at cochlear implantation suggest that earlier implantation might not have as large an effect on speech perception as it does on other language skills.
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    Hearing versus Listening: Attention to Speech and Its Role in Language Acquisition in Deaf Infants with Cochlear Implants
    (Elsevier, 2014-01-01) Houston, Derek M.; Bergeson, Tonya R.; Department of Otolaryngology--Head & Neck Surgery, IU School of Medicine
    The advent of cochlear implantation has provided thousands of deaf infants and children access to speech and the opportunity to learn spoken language. Whether or not deaf infants successfully learn spoken language after implantation may depend in part on the extent to which they listen to speech rather than just hear it. We explore this question by examining the role that attention to speech plays in early language development according to a prominent model of infant speech perception – Jusczyk’s WRAPSA model – and by reviewing the kinds of speech input that maintains normal-hearing infants’ attention. We then review recent findings suggesting that cochlear-implanted infants’ attention to speech is reduced compared to normal-hearing infants and that speech input to these infants differs from input to infants with normal hearing. Finally, we discuss possible roles attention to speech may play on deaf children’s language acquisition after cochlear implantation in light of these findings and predictions from Jusczyk’s WRAPSA model.
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    Hearing, Perception, and Language in Clinical and Typical Populations
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2010-04-09) Miyamoto, Richard T.; Bergson, Tonya R.; Burns, Debra S.; Chin, Steven B.; Houston, Derek M.
    The IUPUI Signature Center for Advanced Studies in Hearing, Perception, and Language is a multidisciplinary, multidepartmental, multischool center dedicated to the integration of knowledge and methodologies from different disciplines to study speech perception and production, music perception and production, language, and cognition in clinical populations across the lifespan. Examples of ongoing research include the assessment of adult cochlear implant users’ perception of pitch; pediatric cochlear implant users’ speech intelligibility, prosody, and vocal music production; infants’ perception of auditory labels for visual objects; and breast cancer survivors’ perception of musical patterns following chemotherapy. In one study, we documented differences in hearing and music cognition between breast cancer survivors who received adjuvant cancer treatment and healthy age- and educationmatched controls. Participants were 29 female breast cancer survivors and 29 healthy controls. All participants received an audiometric test to assess hearing and The Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Amusia, which assesses such perceptual areas as melodic organization, temporal organization, and melodic memory. Results showed a moderate negative correlation between hearing and melodic organization scores across all subjects. For music cognition variables, effect-size analyses of melodic organization tasks (contour, intervals, tonality) suggested that healthy controls scored better than breast cancer survivors, although not significantly. The Center for Advanced Studies in Hearing, Perception, and Language continues to apply both standard and innovative analysis methodology to address cognitive issues of relevance to both clinical and typical populations.
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    Statistical distributions of consonant variants in infant-directed speech: Evidence that /t/ may be exceptional
    (Elsevier, 2019-05-24) Dilley, Laura; Gamache, Jessica; Wang, Yuanyuan; Houston, Derek M.; Bergeson, Tonya R.; Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery, School of Medicine
    Statistical distributions of phonetic variants in spoken language influence speech perception for both language learners and mature users. We theorized that patterns of phonetic variant processing of consonants demonstrated by adults might stem in part from patterns of early exposure to statistics of phonetic variants in infant-directed (ID) speech. In particular, we hypothesized that ID speech might involve greater proportions of canonical /t/ pronunciations compared to adult-directed (AD) speech in at least some phonological contexts. This possibility was tested using a corpus of spontaneous speech of mothers speaking to other adults, or to their typically-developing infant. Tokens of word-final alveolar stops – including /t/, /d/, and the nasal stop /n/ – were examined in assimilable contexts (i.e., those followed by a word-initial labial and/or velar); these were classified as canonical, assimilated, deleted, or glottalized. Results confirmed that there were significantly more canonical pronunciations in assimilable contexts in ID compared with AD speech, an effect which was driven by the phoneme /t/. These findings suggest that at least in phonological contexts involving possible assimilation, children are exposed to more canonical /t/ variant pronunciations than adults are. This raises the possibility that perceptual processing of canonical /t/ may be partly attributable to exposure to canonical /t/ variants in ID speech. Results support the need for further research into how statistics of variant pronunciations in early language input may shape speech processing across the lifespan.
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    Temperament in Toddlers With and Without Prelingual Hearing Loss
    (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, 2024) Castellanos, Irina; Houston, Derek M.; Otolaryngology -- Head and Neck Surgery, School of Medicine
    Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine parent-reported ratings of temperament in toddlers with and without prelingual hearing loss. Method: The parent-completed Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire (ECBQ) was used to assess temperament in toddlers aged 18-36 months. Three dimensions of temperament were examined: surgency, negative affectivity, and effortful control. Analyses were conducted to (a) examine differences in temperament across toddlers with and without prelingual hearing loss; (b) examine possible associations between temperament, demographic, and communication factors; and (c) determine if the ECBQ is sensitive to differences in hearing, communication, and listening skills among toddlers with prelingual hearing loss. Results: The parent-completed ECBQ revealed that toddlers with prelingual hearing loss differed from their hearing peers on some but not all dimensions of temperament. Specifically, children with prelingual hearing loss were rated as displaying higher levels of surgency and lower levels of effortful control but comparable levels of negative affectivity when compared to their hearing peers. Regression analyses revealed that chronological age and communication strategy predicted scores of effortful control in toddlers with prelingual hearing loss, whereas chronological age alone predicted scores of effortful control in toddlers with hearing. Finally, the ECBQ appears to contain "listening" items that skew (lower) levels of effortful control in toddlers with prelingual hearing loss, such that only the group effect of higher levels of surgency remained after removing these "listening" items. Correlations between the original and our modified ECBQ (removing the "listening" items) revealed strong associations, reflective of high construct validity. Conclusions: This was the first study to measure temperament in toddlers with prelingual hearing loss using the ECBQ. Our results revealed differences between children with and without prelingual hearing loss centering on the dimension of surgency. Examining differences in temperament during the toddler period of development may be particularly important and useful for predicting functional outcomes following prelingual hearing loss.
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    Vowel discrimination by hearing infants as a function of number of spectral channels
    (AIP Publishing, 2014-05) Warner-Czyz, Andrea D.; Houston, Derek M.; Hynan, Linda S.; Medicine, School of Medicine
    Reduced spectral resolution negatively impacts speech perception, particularly perception of vowels and consonant place. This study assessed impact of number of spectral channels on vowel discrimination by 6-month-old infants with normal hearing by comparing three listening conditions: Unprocessed speech, 32 channels, and 16 channels. Auditory stimuli (/ti/ and /ta/) were spectrally reduced using a noiseband vocoder and presented to infants with normal hearing via visual habituation. Results supported a significant effect of number of channels on vowel discrimination by 6-month-old infants. No differences emerged between unprocessed and 32-channel conditions in which infants looked longer during novel stimulus trials (i.e., discrimination). The 16-channel condition yielded a significantly different pattern: Infants demonstrated no significant difference in looking time to familiar vs novel stimulus trials, suggesting infants cannot discriminate /ti/ and /ta/ with only 16 channels. Results support effects of spectral resolution on vowel discrimination. Relative to published reports, young infants need more spectral detail than older children and adults to perceive spectrally degraded speech. Results have implications for development of perception by infants with hearing loss who receive auditory prostheses.