PERCEPTION OF VOICING CUES BY CHILDREN WITH EARLY OTITIS-MEDIA WITH AND WITHOUT LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT

Research on the relationship between early otitis media with effusion (OME), language impairment, and central auditory processing has been e quivocal. Identification and discrimination tasks provide us with a se nsitive method of assessing speech perception on both an auditory and a phonetic level. The present study examined identification and discri mination of initial bilabial stop consonants differing in voicing by g -year-old children with a history of severe OME. The groups studied we re controlled for language impairment. The ability of these children t o perceive major and minor voicing cues was examined using multiple vo icing cues. Long-term effects of OME were found for both identificatio n and discrimination performance. Children with OME produced an overal l inconsistency in categorization, which suggests poorer phonetic proc essing. Discrimination was measured by means of ''just noticeable diff erences'' (JND). Children with early OME experience demonstrated a gre ater mean JND than children without early OME experience. Finally, in cases of language impairment with early OME, there was no additional d eterioration of auditory or phonetic processing. It appears that eithe r early OME or language impairment can lead to poorer perception.