Low-Level Speech Recognition of Children with Hearing Aids.

In phase 1 of the study, aided speech recognition was significantly poorer in children with hearing loss at all presentation levels. Higher aided SII in the better ear (55 dB sound pressure level input) was associated with higher Consonant-Nucleus-Consonant word recognition at a 40 dBA presentation level. In phase 2, increasing the hearing aid gain for low-level inputs provided a significant improvement in syllable-final plural recognition at very low-level inputs and resulted in a nonsignificant trend toward better monosyllabic word recognition at very low presentation levels. Additional research is needed to document the speech recognition difficulties children with hearing aids may experience with low-level speech in the real world as well as the potential benefit or detriment of providing additional low-level hearing aid gain.