Current State of Knowledge: Speech Recognition and Production in Children with Hearing Impairment

Abstract

This review summarizes the prevalent literature covering speech recognition and production in children with mild to severe hearing impairment (HI). In general, the ability to recognize and produce speech improves as the child matures but decreases with greater severity of hearing loss. Performance scores on measures of phonetic contrast perception and word recognition are relatively high for children with mild to severe HI when compared to children with profound HI, but not as high as scores for children with normal hearing (NH). Babbling may develop at a slower rate for infants with mild to moderate HI when compared to that of infants with NH. Articulation is not severely affected by mild to severe HI and the most common errors are omissions and substitutions, particularly for fricatives and affricates. Children with mild to severe HI generally produce intelligible speech.

In Brief

This review synthesizes the evidence on speech recognition and production in children with mild to severe sensorineural hearing impairment. The section on the perception of speech focuses on the effects of hearing impairment on phonetic contrasts and word recognition. The section on the production of speech highlights the effects of hearing impairment on babbling and types of articulation errors. Effects of age and degree of hearing impairment are examined when possible.