Effect of hearing experience on preschool-aged children's eye gaze to a talker during spoken language processing.

ABSTRACT: Speechreading-gathering speech information from talkers' faces-supports speech perception when speech acoustics are degraded. Benefitting from speechreading, however, requires listeners to visually fixate talkers during face-to-face interactions. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that preschool-aged children allocate their eye gaze to a talker when speech acoustics are degraded. We implemented a looking-while-listening paradigm to quantify children's eye gaze to an unfamiliar female talker and two images of familiar objects presented on a screen while the children listened to speech. We tested 31 children (12 girls), ages 26-48 months, who had normal hearing (NH group, n = 19) or bilateral sensorineural hearing loss and used hearing devices (D/HH group, n = 12). Children'

SUBMITTER: Grieco-Calub TM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11864895 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature