UMR 5549, Faculté de Médecine Purpan, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Toulouse, France.
Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, Université de Toulouse, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France.
Sci Rep. 2019 Mar 5;9(1):3532. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-39991-9.
Auditory categorization is an important process in the perception and understanding of everyday sounds. The use of cochlear implants (CIs) may affect auditory categorization and result in poor abilities. The current study was designed to compare how children with normal hearing (NH) and children with CIs categorize a set of everyday sounds. We tested 24 NH children and 24 children with CI on a free-sorting task of 18 everyday sounds corresponding to four a priori categories: nonlinguistic human vocalizations, environmental sounds, musical sounds, and animal vocalizations. Multiple correspondence analysis revealed considerable variation within both groups of child listeners, although the human vocalizations and musical sounds were similarly categorized. In contrast to NH children, children with CIs categorized some sounds according to their acoustic content rather than their associated semantic information. These results show that despite identification deficits, children with CIs are able to categorize environmental and vocal sounds in a similar way to NH children, and are able to use categorization as an adaptive process when dealing with everyday sounds.
听觉分类是感知和理解日常声音的一个重要过程。使用人工耳蜗（CI）可能会影响听觉分类，并导致分类能力较差。本研究旨在比较正常听力（NH）儿童和 CI 儿童对一组日常声音的分类。我们对 24 名 NH 儿童和 24 名 CI 儿童进行了 18 种日常声音的自由分类任务测试，这些声音对应于四个先验类别：非语言人声、环境声音、音乐声音和动物声音。多元对应分析显示，尽管人类声音和音乐声音的分类相似，但两组儿童听众内部都存在相当大的差异。与 NH 儿童不同的是，CI 儿童根据声音的声学内容而不是其相关的语义信息对一些声音进行分类。这些结果表明，尽管存在识别缺陷，但 CI 儿童能够以类似于 NH 儿童的方式对环境和人声进行分类，并且能够在处理日常声音时将分类作为一种自适应过程。
