Article published November 29, 2008
Hearing-impaired babies studied
Research tests reaction to mom's voice
By MEGHAN GILBERT
Blade staff writer
Mothers using "baby talk" could be just as important for hearing-impaired children as it is for babies with normal hearing.
Researchers at Bowling Green State University are working with the Indiana University school of medicine to investigate the ways mothers talk to their babies and the infants' responses, particularly among babies who have cochlear implants because of hearing impairment.
A cochlear implant is surgically placed in the inner ear and sends electrical signals to the auditory nerve so that the brain perceives sound.
"The development of speech and language by children that have a cochlear implant is incredibly variable," said Laura Dilley, an assistant professor of psychology and communication disorders at BGSU.
"Some children are able to perform in clinical tests that are close to their peers, but it's only a few and most are very far behind," she said.
The sounds from cochlear implants are "massively distorted," so while adults who lose their hearing later in life can do pretty well with them, because they already have language skills, for young children it is a lot different, Ms. Dilley said.The quality of mothers' speech to hearing babies is "incredibly important to how infants develop language," Ms. Dilley said, and this research investigates if that is the same for children with hearing impairments.
The research is funded with a nearly $2 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
Tonya Bergeson, an assistant professor of otolaryngology at Indiana University school of medicine, is the project leader.
She explained that baby talk - the technical term is infant-directed speech - is a unique type of sound that is higher, more melodic, and exaggerated.
"People think that baby talk is just talking like a baby, goo goo ga ga, but it's talking in a specific way to the baby," she said.
Prior research has shown babies prefer that type of speech and that it helps in early language skills for a variety of reasons, including the slower rate of speech and the exaggerated vowel sounds.
Ms. Bergeson is in charge of the preference tests with the babies. Since the infants can't tell her what they think, other methods are needed, such as visual pictures.
Babies look longer at a visual picture if they are attracted to it by sound as well, Ms. Bergeson said, so researchers run tests with baby talk, adult speech, and no sound, then measure little ones' responses by how long they maintain attention.
Do babies with cochlear implants observe the different types of speech? The researchers are a little over a year into the project and preliminary data suggest they do.
"It takes about a year after getting the cochlear implants to show any preference for speech over silence," Ms. Bergeson said. "At that point it looks like preference for baby talk over adult-directed speech."
So far, researchers have studied about 30 to 40 babies with cochlear implants, about 30 with hearing aids, and hundreds of babies with normal hearing to serve as the control group, Ms. Bergeson said.
Ms. Dilley's part of the project is studying the moms' speech.
She is investigating if mothers use more of the traditional baby talk with hearing children because they get responses and interaction from the baby, such as giggles and smiles.
Some research suggests that when mothers learn of a hearing impairment, they speak differently to the child, such as being more repetitive and using a more controlled voice, Ms. Dilley said.
Mothers might not realize it or think about how that could affect the way a child learns language.
J. Devin McAuley, an associate professor of psychology who is married to Ms. Dilley, also is involved in the project and is responsible for some of the technical aspects and the data analysis.
While much of the research and the infant trials are taking place in Indiana, the data will be analyzed in Bowling Green. Some undergraduate students at BGSU will be involved in the analysis.
Contact Meghan Gilbert at:
mgilbert@theblade.com
or 419-724-6134.
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