MINIMAL HIGH-FREQUENCY HEARING-LOSS AND SCHOOL-AGE-CHILDREN - SPEECH RECOGNITION IN A CLASSROOM

The purpose of this study was to assess the consonant and vowel identi fication abilities of 12 children with minimal high-frequency hearing loss, 12 children with normal hearing, and 12 young adults with normal hearing ising nonsense syllables recorded in a classroom with a rever beration time of 0.7 s in two conditions of: (1) quiet and (2) noise ( +13 dB S/N against a multi-talker babble). The young adults achieved s ignificantly higher mean consonant and vowel identification scores tha t both groups of children. The children with normal hearing had signif icantly higher mean consonant identification scores in quiet than the children with minimal high-frequency hearing loss, but the groups perf ormances did not differ in noise. Further, the two groups of children did not differ in vowel identification performance. Listeners' respons es to consonant stimuli were converted to confusion matrices and submi tted to a sequential information analysis (SINFA, Wang & Bilger, 1973) . The SINFA determined that the amount of information transmitted, bot h overall and for individual features, differed as a function of liste ner group and listening condition.