Stacey Kane has been awarded a New Investigators Research Grant from the ASHFoundation for her project, Acoustic-Phonetic Cues for Children’s Recognition of Glimpsed Speech. Her research will examine how children use speech cues to understand language in noisy environments and how factors such as age, vocabulary, and hearing loss may affect their ability to recognize speech.
| Acoustic-Phonetic Cues for Children's Recognition of Glimpsed Speech |
| Children’s listening environments are inherently noisy, which can reduce their access to the content of direct instruction and incidental learning opportunities. When listening to a speech target in fluctuating background noise (e.g., other people talking), there are brief “glimpses” when the spectro-temporal properties of the target are more intense relative to the masker. Adults are very good at using the sparse auditory cues within glimpses to understand speech in complex background noise. Importantly, glimpsing ability develops during childhood, which means that younger children’s speech recognition is more susceptible to the adverse effects of complex auditory backgrounds. Children’s ability to glimpse auditory information from within a fluctuating masker is influenced by developmental factors like selective attention, processing efficiency, and linguistic knowledge; however, little is known about the specific acoustic-phonetic cues children use to facilitate masked speech recognition. When listening to glimpsed sentences, adults rely on information provided by vowels over consonants at a 2:1 ratio. It has been suggested that the relative importance of vowels and consonants for glimpsed sentence recognition stems from adults’ reliance on top-down linguistic cues that can be used to recognize speech using the auditory cues made available within a glimpse. Importantly, studies addressing children’s sentence recognition and relative cue importance cite the adult literature without considering the known impacts of development on performance in other speech perception domains. The studies in this proposal address a major gap in the literature by directly examining the effects of age, vocabulary size, and phonological awareness on children’s use of acoustic-phonetic cues for glimpsed sentence recognition. The first two aims of this proposal include children with normal hearing, age 5 to 13 years-old; the third aim will examine a pilot cohort of children with sensorineural hearing loss (wearing hearing aids). Understanding the typical developmental trajectory for children’s acoustic-phonetic cue use during school age will lay the foundation to develop strategies for improving masked speech recognition for all children. Moreover, this work is an important first step in considering how childhood hearing loss delays or changes this developmental trajectory. |
Dr. Kane is an audiologist and hearing scientist specializing in pediatric auditory skill development. She earned her AuD from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014. Dr. Kane practiced as a pediatric audiologist at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and as a research audiologist before beginning her PhD coursework at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2018. She completed her PhD in August 2024. Dr. Kane's research interests include perceptual, linguistic, and developmental factors affecting speech perception in children with hearing loss.
