An Adaptation of the Hybrid Visual Habituation Paradigm to Assess Speech Perception in Young Children with Cochlear Implants

Current speech perception methodologies for young children are limited to those that require behavioral and metacognitive responses from the participant. The visual habituation paradigm (VHP) is a procedure that uses novelty preference (measured by a child's looking time) to illustrate perception of novel auditory stimuli. The purpose of the current study was to determine whether a variant of the hybrid visual habituation paradigm (HVHP) could be used to measure individual differences in the perception of a of prosodic and segmental speech features in a group of deaf children with cochlear implants. Participants were assessed on the perception of three speech features (vowel height, lexical stress, intonation) using a modified HVHP. Analyses showed that all of the participants exhibited longer looking times to the novel auditory stimuli during the experimental trial. Additional analyses illustrated that the modified HVHP is a promising method for assessing the perception of vowel height, lexical stress and intonation in young children with cochlear implants.