Recognition of Time-compressed Words in Adults and Children

Recognition of Time-compressed Words in Adults and Children Hyemi Park and Hyunsook Jang Graduate Program in Audiology, Hallym University, Chuncheon, Korea Division of Speech Pathology and Audiology, Audiology & Speech Pathology Research Institute, Hallym University, Chuncheon, Korea The purpose of this study was to identify recognition abilities of time-compressed speech in order to apply the assessment of central auditory function. Two Korean monosyllabic word lists, the KS-list and the H-list were compressed with four ratios: 45, 55, 65, and 75%. Furthermore, the list equivalency of each list was examined with the compression ratio of 65%. The subjects of this study included 24 adults, and 36 school-aged children, having normal hearing sensitivity. The results of this study were summarized as follows: First, as the compression ratio increased from 45% to 75%, recognition performance decreased significantly from 88.00% to 29.67% for the KS-list and from 93.60% to 39.00% for the H-list. There were no significant recognition differences except for 75% in the compressed ratio when comparing recognition scores between the two lists. In children, recognition performance of compressed speech was significantly decreased from 71.47% to 30.93% in the lower grade group (mean: 8.2) and from 94.93% to 30.93% in the higher grade group (mean: 11.7) as compression ratio increased from 45% to 75%. Within five conditions, 0, 45, 55, 65, and 75%, there were no significant recognition differences between the two groups. Second, the four sub-lists of each word list for adults under the 65% compression ratio revealed no significant differences in the recognition scores, thus confirming the equivalency of each word list. This study showed that the recognition performance of children was lower than adults in all compression ratios. Therefore, the results suggest that different compression ratios might be used for adults and children when applying the measurement of central auditory processing. Appropriate compression ratios for adults are between 45% and 55%, and for children, it is below 45%.