Similar gaze behaviour during dialogue perception in congenitally deaf children with cochlear Implants and normal hearing children

Background

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.

Aim

Here, we describe a way of investigating the link between language comprehension and anticipatory verbal behaviour promoting the use of more complex listening situations.

Methods and Procedure

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).

Outcomes and Results

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.

Conclusion

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 THIS PAPER ADDS

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.