Noise and reverberation impair phoneme perception in children more than in adults

Measuring aided speech discrimination is a crucial component of clinical outcome assessment for children using hearing
aids (HA) and cochlear implants (CI). Traditionally, clinicians have relied on their own voices to evaluate aided hearing
functionality and speech discrimination by producing phonemes - the smallest units of sound that distinguish words - to
eliminate semantic context and vocabulary effects. Children frequently encounter noisy and reverberant environments, which pose significant challenges, particularly for those using HAs and CIs. Despite the technological differences between acoustically-driven HAs and electrically-driven CIs, and the variability in test implementations across studies, few investigations have directly compared phoneme discrimination among children with normal hearing (NH), HAs, and CIs.
The aim of this study was to develop an objective phoneme discrimination test in noise and reverberation and to evaluate
the phoneme discrimination abilities of children with NH, bilateral HAs, and bilateral CIs under quiet, noisy, and reverberant conditions.