Do Eyes Hear or Does the Mind Confuse? The Effect of Different Visual Conditions on Speech Perception in Noise in Children.

PURPOSE Understanding children's speech perception strategies in noise is very important for improving their living environment. Previous studies with adults reported that closing the eyes improves speech understanding in noise by increasing the activation of cortical systems involved in listening and attention, while increased cognitive load makes speech understanding in noise more difficult. This study aimed to investigate the effects of listening conditions on speech perception in noise in children. METHOD The study recruited 102 typically developing children, 51 girls and 51 boys, aged between 7 and 12 years with typical hearing. Speech intelligibility tests were performed in noise under three different conditions: eyes open (EO), eyes closed (EC), and watching cartoon (WC), which is assumed to increase cognitive load. All conditions were applied randomly (without any order in the conditions) to each participant. RESULTS In the speech intelligibility test in noise, the lowest signal-to-noise ratio (the best performance) was obtained in the EO, EC, and WC conditions, respectively. When EO-EC, EO-WC, and EC-WC were compared by the post hoc analysis, the largest effect size was obtained in EO-WC, EO-EC, and EC-WC, respectively. When evaluated in terms of genders, no statistically significant difference was found for the three listening conditions. CONCLUSIONS It has been shown that children's speech perception abilities in noise are affected at different levels by various factors such as open-closed eyes, auditory attention, and cognitive load. The best speech perception performance in noise was obtained in the EO condition, which is the natural situation.