Speech Recognition Training in Children With Hearing Loss

Imagine that someday, children with hearing loss can prepare for an upcoming school year by playing computer games with their new teacher's voice throughout the summer. Then, on the first day of class, children would have that "Oprah Winfrey effect", the sense that they know the teacher. Children would be able to recognize their teacher's voice much better than they would have otherwise, and importantly, they would experience less anxiety because of the talker familiarity effect. clEAR is making that "someday" a reality today. clEAR has created a new web-based clinical tool for audiologists and teachers to provide customized auditory brain training to their patients (www.clearforears.com). Auditory brain training includes traditional analytic and synthetic training as well as training to develop those auditory cognitive skills that are necessary to decode spoken language regardless of the content (i.e., auditory working memory, auditory attention, and auditory processing speed). The centerpiece of the clEAR website is a set of auditory brain training games that patients play, with oversight and coaching from their hearing healthcare provider or from one of clEAR's inhouse audiologists. Currently, clEAR caters to adult patients, and the games require some reading ability and a vocabulary that includes the most common words of the English language (N=800 words). clEAR has been enrolling paying adult subscribers since May of 2017. In the laboratory, a research version of pediatric games is being tested. The pediatric games are "childfriendly" and require only a limited vocabulary and no reading skills. In this Phase 1, the investigators will first conduct focus groups with 10 children who have undergone training with the research version of clEAR's pediatric games, then they will recode the games from LabView to Java Script, making changes in the games in response to the focus group comments, and finally, they will collect data from 20 children to assess whether web-based auditory brain training improves their abilities to recognize the speech of their (hypothetical) upcoming school year's classroom teacher. The experimental design will be a within-subjects A1-A2-B1-B2 design, where children will serve as their own controls. Participants will be tested two times before training with a one-week interval separating the test sessions (A1 and A2), to establish a baseline performance, and then immediately after training (B1) to establish immediate gains and three weeks later to assess whether gains begin to decline following training (B2). All testing and training will occur during the summer so the experimental results will not be confounded by benefits possibly accrued through school-related activities. Children will complete a total of 16 hours of training and will follow the same schedule (i.e., play the games in a prescribed order and for a set amount of time each). Outcome measures will come from a comprehensive speech perception test battery, questionnaires, and from data collected during training and stored on the children's training tablets. In Phase II, the pediatric games will be transferred to the clEAR website and develop their commercial potential.