Directional Listening in Children with Hearing Loss

Directional Listening in Children with Hearing Loss Directional Listening in Children with Hearing Loss This project seeks to examine childrens sensitivity to auditory input from the front and rear hemispheres on the horizontal plain. The directional characteristics of listening in children with normal hearing will be determined first followed by children with hearing loss using a hearing aid feature designed to optimize speech input while managing unwanted noise in the environment. Participants will complete word recognition and non-word detection tasks while seated in an array of 6 loudspeakers located at 60o intervals. The stimuli will be presented randomly from the six loudspeakers to simulate listening in a group or classroom setting. The objectives of this project are to: 1) map the spatial sensitivity of children with normal hearing to familiar and unfamiliar words, 2) map the spatial sensitivity of children with hearing loss for the same stimuli without amplification to determine whether or not they have formed preferences for auditory input from the front or rear hemispheres, and 3) compare the sensitivity of children with hearing loss to their peers with normal hearing while using omnidirectional amplification and amplification with noise management that includes voice activity detection.