The aim of the current study included: (I) determining lexical effects on SWR in the Persian-speaking preschool-aged children with HL and (II) comparing the SWR performance of the children to the preschool-aged children with NH. As a cross-sectional study, the study was administered to seventeen 5-to-6-year-old children of Soroush Rehabilitation Center for Children with Hearing Loss in Shiraz City, Iran. We used the preschool version of the Persian Lexical Neighborhood Tests (PLNTs-PV) to investigate the SWR performance of the children with HL. In addition, their scores on the PLNTs-PV were compared to the SWR performance of the children with NH. The SWR performance of the preschool-aged children with HL did not change by using the spoken words with different lexical difficulties under spectrally degraded conditions dissimilar to those with NH. According to the findings of this study, the processes of word recognition in preschool-aged children with HL were not influenced by lexical difficulty and word length under spectrally degraded conditions. In addition, the speech recognition processes of preschool-aged children with HL did not develop compared to those with NH. Therefore, managing background noise and early intervention to train SiN skills may be two practical solutions to improve speech perception in preschool-aged children with HL.

Hearing Impairement

speech

perception

children

test