Speech discrimination in children: auditory and auditory/visual processing with binaural and monaural presentation.

The Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification test was recorded with electret microphones inserted at the ear canals of a child listener. This recording paradigm has been shown to preserve binaural cues. Thirty normal-hearing children (ages 6 to 14) responded to binaural and monaural stimulation under auditory and auditory/visual presentation at six signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios (varying from +3 to -12 dB). At the higher and lower S/N ratios, the binaural advantage was minimized. For the auditory alone mode, the largest mean difference of 21% intelligibility improvement from monaural to binaural presentations occurred at -6 dB S/N, whereas in the auditory/visual mode, an intelligibility improvement of 20.8% occurred at -9 dB S/N. Implications for binaural amplification for the hearing impaired who operate on minimal residual hearing follow from the results of this study.