Aix Marseille Univ, Inserm, INS, Inst Neurosci Syst, Marseille, France.
Aix-Marseille Univ, Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain, Marseille, France.
Int J Lang Commun Disord. 2024 Nov-Dec;59(6):2441-2453. doi: 10.1111/1460-6984.13094. Epub 2024 Jul 29.
Perceptual and speech production abilities of children with cochlear implants (CIs) are usually tested by word and sentence repetition or naming tests. However, these tests are quite far apart from daily life linguistic contexts.
Here, we describe a way of investigating the link between language comprehension and anticipatory verbal behaviour promoting the use of more complex listening situations.
The setup consists in watching the audio-visual dialogue of two actors. Children's gaze switches from one speaker to the other serve as a proxy of their prediction abilities. Moreover, to better understand the basis and the impact of anticipatory behaviour, we also measured children's ability to understand the dialogue content, their speech perception and memory skills as well as their rhythmic skills, that also require temporal predictions. Importantly, we compared children with CI performances with those of an age-matched group of children with normal hearing (NH).
While children with CI revealed poorer speech perception and verbal working memory abilities than NH children, there was no difference in gaze anticipatory behaviour. Interestingly, in children with CI only, we found a significant correlation between dialogue comprehension, perceptual skills and gaze anticipatory behaviour.
Our results extend to a dialogue context of previous findings showing an absence of predictive deficits in children with CI. The current design seems an interesting avenue to provide an accurate and objective estimate of anticipatory language behaviour in a more ecological linguistic context also with young children.
What is already known on the subject Children with cochlear implants seem to have difficulties extracting structure from and learning sequential input patterns, possibly due to signal degradation and auditory deprivation in the first years of life. They also seem to have a reduced use of contextual information and slow language processing among children with hearing loss. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Here we show that when adopting a rather complex linguistic context such as watching a dialogue of two individuals, children with cochlear implants are able to use the speech and language structure to anticipate gaze switches to the upcoming speaker. What are the clinical implications of this work? The present design seems an interesting avenue to provide an accurate and objective estimate of anticipatory behaviour in a more ecological and dynamic linguistic context. Importantly, this measure is implicit and it has been previously used with very young (normal-hearing) children, showing that they spontaneously make anticipatory gaze switches by age two. Thus, this approach may be of interest to refine the speech comprehension assessment at a rather early age after cochlear implantation where explicit behavioural tests are not always reliable and sensitive.
人工耳蜗植入（CI）儿童的感知和言语产生能力通常通过单词和句子重复或命名测试来测试。然而，这些测试与日常生活语言环境相去甚远。
在这里，我们描述了一种调查语言理解和预期言语行为之间联系的方法，该方法促进了更复杂听力情境的使用。
该设置包括观看两个演员的视听对话。儿童的目光从一个说话者转移到另一个说话者，可以作为其预测能力的替代指标。此外，为了更好地理解预期行为的基础和影响，我们还测量了儿童理解对话内容、言语感知和记忆技能以及节奏感的能力，这些能力也需要时间预测。重要的是，我们将 CI 患儿的表现与年龄匹配的正常听力（NH）儿童组进行了比较。
虽然 CI 患儿的言语感知和言语工作记忆能力比 NH 儿童差，但在注视预测行为上没有差异。有趣的是，仅在 CI 患儿中，我们发现对话理解、感知技能和注视预测行为之间存在显著相关性。
我们的研究结果扩展到对话情境中，先前的研究结果表明 CI 儿童不存在预测缺陷。目前的设计似乎是一种有趣的方法，可以在更生态的语言环境中，对年幼儿童的预期语言行为进行准确和客观的估计。
