Purpose: The study explored whether visual information
improves speech identification in typically developing
children with normal hearing when the auditory signal is
spectrally degraded.
Method: Children (n = 69) and adults (n = 15) were presented
with noise-vocoded sentences from the Children’s
Co-ordinate Response Measure (Rosen, 2011) in auditoryonly
or audiovisual conditions. The number of bands was
adaptively varied to modulate the degradation of the auditory
signal, with the number of bands required for approximately
79% correct identification calculated as the threshold.
Results: The youngest children (4- to 5-year-olds) did
not benefit from accompanying visual information, in
comparison to 6- to 11-year-old children and adults.
Audiovisual gain also increased with age in the child
sample.
Conclusions: The current data suggest that children
younger than 6 years of age do not fully utilize visual
speech cues to enhance speech perception when the
auditory signal is degraded. This evidence not only
has implications for understanding the development of
speech perception skills in children with normal hearing
but may also inform the development of new treatment
and intervention strategies that aim to remediate
speech perception difficulties in pediatric cochlear implant
users