RESUMO
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is one of the important parameters to be considered for the effective perception of speech. Many researchers indicate that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have reduced capacity to integrate sensory information across different modalities and show speech understanding difficulty in the presence of background speech or noise. So, this present study was undertaken with the aimed to evaluate and compare the speech perception ability in quiet and in the presence of noise for children with and without ASD and also to compare across different noise conditions. Speech perception in noise was measured for 15 children with ASD and 15 age-matched children without ASD in the age range of 8 to 12 years. The stimulus includes standardized bisyllabic and trisyllabic Kannada words in quiet and at different SNR conditions. The result showed that children with ASD had poor performance in all the listening conditions (quiet, speech babble, and speech noise) and the syllable conditions (bisyllables and trisyllables) compared to children without ASD. When compared across quiet and different SNR conditions for individuals with ASD, the result showed the best performance in quiet conditions followed by different SNR conditions. The performance deteriorated with a decrease in SNR for both groups. Children with ASD showed poor performance in quiet and in the presence of noise compared to children without ASD. Speech perception evaluation in the presence of noise provides a more reliable predictor of the communication difficulty faced by children with ASD than evaluating only in quiet conditions.
RESUMO
Perceptual restoration occurs when the brain restores missing segments from speech under certain conditions. It is investigated in the auditory modality, but minimal evidence has been collected during speechreading tasks. The authors measured perceptual restoration in speechreading by individuals with hearing loss and compared it to perceptual restoration in auditory speech by normally hearing individuals. Visual perceptual restoration for speechreading was measured in 33 individuals with profound hearing loss by blurring the keywords in silent video recordings of a speaker uttering a sentence. Auditory perceptual restoration was measured in 33 normally hearing individuals by distorting the keywords in spoken sentences. It was found that the amount of restoration was similar for speechreading through the visual modality by individuals with hearing loss and speech perception through the auditory modality by normally hearing individuals. These findings may facilitate understanding of speech processing by individuals with hearing loss.
