Publications

Speaking intelligibly is an important achievement in children's language development. How far do congenitally severe-to-profound hearing-impaired children who received a cochlear implant (CI) in the first two years of their life advance on the path to intelligibility in comparison to children with typical hearing (NH)? Spontaneous speech samples of children with CI and children with NH were orthographically transcribed by naive transcribers. The ...

A growing number of people with profound hearing loss benefit these days from a cochlear implant (CI). It allows them to (re)gain access to sound through electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve. Today, the benefit of a CI is evaluated by asking the CI user to recall words or sentences, which is not always optimal. The required active participation of the listener can make these measurements challenging or even impossible, e.g., in young ...

Stuttering, a multicomponent fluency disorder wherein speech is disrupted by involuntary part-word repetitions, prolongations and blocks, frequently occurs in individuals with Down syndrome. Down syndrome (DS), the result of an extra copy of chromosome 21, is characterized by specific weaknesses and strengths in the functioning of individuals with this diagnosis. Weaknesses in their language and speech abilities often result in diminished speech ...

Speech perception in difficult listening conditions depends highly on the temporal processing ability of the auditory pathway. In the present study, we investigate the inter-subject variability of young normal-hearing listeners in the identification of time-compressed speech and how the ability to identify time-compressed speech, as assessed by the speech reception threshold (SRTrate: the speech rate at which 50% of the speech is perceived ...

Auditory brainstem implantation (ABI) is a relative recent development in paediatric hearing restoration. Consequently, young-implanted children's productive language has not received much attention. This study investigated speech intelligibility of children with ABI (N = 3) in comparison to children with cochlear implants (CI) and children with typical hearing (TH). Spontaneous speech samples were recorded from children representing the three ...

INTRODUCTION: Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) often stutter, which can affect their speech intelligibility. Previous research has shown that manual signs can enhance speech intelligibility and comprehensibility. It remains unclear to what extent spontaneous hand gestures, such as iconic and beat gestures, may enhance intelligibility and/or comprehensibility during utterances with stuttering events. METHODS: Eleven individuals with DS who ...

Objective.Currently, only behavioral speech understanding tests are available, which require active participation of the person being tested. As this is infeasible for certain populations, an objective measure of speech intelligibility is required. Recently, brain imaging data has been used to establish a relationship between stimulus and brain response. Linear models have been successfully linked to speech intelligibility but require ...