A Comparative Study Listener's Ability to Understand of Speech Moderate to Severe Hearing Loss 36-72 month old Children in Noisy& Silent Environment

Language development in the beginning of life and childhood is mainly based on hearing sense. So، deficiency in this sense can cause some problems، which are different based on the type and rate of hearing-impairment. Speech intelligibility is described as the ability to understand speech; speech disorder recognition is one of them. The main objective of this study is comparison of listener''s ability to understand speech in an environment with or without noise of hearing- impaired children. Furthermore، we also aim to score the listener’s ability to understand the use of speech. This study is a descriptive، analytical، short term one، which was performed on a group of available 20 children with hearing impairment between the ages of 36-72 months. 30 word images were shown to child in noiseless environments and sound samples of children were recorded by an audio recording device and the sound samples were then played for the selected listeners. The listeners were asked to hear the words that were recorded. Then those sound samples were combined with noise and after 8 days were played for the same listeners and the process was repeated. The listener''s ability to understand the speech of children was analyzed. Finally، the data were analyzed by SPSS statistical software. Once the speech intelligibility scoring test (word images) was performed the average resolution of listener''swas calculated. The average resolution of all words in the resolution was 37/40 and 40/71. Average listener''s ability to understand words in the noise-free environment compared to the noisy environment was much better. As a result the listener''s ability to understand children’s speech with hearing loss in a noiseless environment is more than a listener''s ability to understand the same children’s speech in an environment with noise.