Vowel recognition in noise: A comparison of children with cochlear implants and children with typical hearing

Our objective was to examine how children with bilateral cochlear implants (CIs) recognize the five Spanish vowels in different noise conditions, in comparison to children with typical hearing (TH). The stimuli (the syllables [da], [de], [di], [do], [du]) were embedded in either multi-speaker background babble or speech-shaped noise at the signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of 0, 6, and 12 dB (forced-choice paradigm). Main effects for Group (of children), Vowel, NoiseType, and SNR were found significant as well as interactions between Group*Vowel and NoiseType*SNR. These results toge-ther with the matrix analyses revealed high error rates for [u] in both groups of children, for [o] in children with CIs only, and frequent confusions of [u] and [o] in both groups, but especially for children with CIs. We conclude that recognizing certain vowels can be challenging in the presence of noise, for children in general but for children with CIs in particular.