Abstract
Studies on the speech and language development of hearing-impaired children often focus on (deviations in) the
children’s speech production. However, it is unclear if listeners also perceive differences
between the speech of normally hearing and hearing-impaired children. This contribution wants to fill this void by investigating
the overall perceived speech quality of both groups. Three groups of listeners (speech and language pathologists, primary school
teachers and inexperienced listeners) judged 126 utterances of seven normally hearing children, seven children with an acoustic
hearing aid and seven children with a cochlear implant, in a comparative judgment task. All children were approximately seven
years old and received, in the case of the hearing-impaired children, their assistive hearing device before the age of two.
The online tool D-PAC was used to administer the comparative judgement task. The listeners compared stimuli in
pairs and decided which stimulus sounded best. This method ultimately leads to a ranking in which all stimuli are represented
according to their overall perceived speech quality.
The main result is that the speech of normally hearing children was preferred by the listeners. This indicates
that, even after several years of device use, the speech quality of hearing-impaired children is perceived as different from that
of normally hearing children. Within the group of hearing-impaired children, cochlear implanted children were judged to exhibit
higher speech quality than acoustically hearing aided children, especially after a longer device use. The speech quality of the
latter group, on the other hand, remained practically stable. Listeners, irrespectively of their degree of experience with
(hearing-impaired) children’s speech, completed the task similarly. In other words: the difference between the overall perceived
speech quality of normally hearing and hearing-impaired children is salient for all listener groups and they all slightly
preferred children with a cochlear implant over children with an acoustic hearing aid.
Identificeerbaarheid van kinderen met een gehoorbeperking