EAST LANSING, Mich. — A team of Michigan State University researchers is trying to determine if parents’ use of “baby talk” can be useful in teaching children with hearing loss, especially those with cochlear implants, language and speech skills.
Using a grant of $330,000 from the National Institutes of Health, MSU’s Laura Dilley is heading a team that is attempting to determine if the singsong style of baby talk helps children with hearing loss, especially those with cochlear implants, because it draws attention to the voice.
Dilley, an assistant professor of communicative sciences and disorders, hopes the study will lead to better understanding of factors that affect parents’ knowledge of how to speak to and help their hearing-impaired children with speech and language skills. Such knowledge, researchers say, is likely to lead to better interventions with these children on the parts of parents, clinicians and educators.
"Learning language is different and difficult for all children, and more so if you are a child with an implant,” Dilley said. “Children don't know what language sounds like or where the words begin and end, and for those with hearing loss, it's like listening to a foreign language. We want to make it easier for all children to learn their first language.”
Dilley said that earlier studies have shown that babies with normal hearing more easily detect words in a speech stream when the speech is presented in a baby-talk manner.
"While we don't know everything about how speech and language skills develop in children with normal hearing, we know even less about children with hearing impairments,” she said. “Children with cochlear implants in particular acquire speech and language skills in different ways. Some never acquire those useful verbal communication skills, and some end up performing within normal limits on clinical speech and language tests. We want to find out why there are differences and how we can help these children."
And while studies continue, the jury remains out on whether baby talk is a useful tool to help hearing-impaired children acquire speech and language skills.
"For children with normal hearing, the patterns in baby talk are useful, but because cochlear implants dramatically degrade sound quality, it's not likely to be as useful to hearing-impaired infants," Dilley said. "The sound through an implant is raspy, sort of like Darth Vader being in the next room, because the device doesn't transmit acoustic information well and pitch in particular. Some attributes of baby talk could be useful to hearing-impaired children, like timing and patterns of speech, but probably not pitch."
Dilley's project follows children, some with normal hearing and others with hearing loss, during a five-year period to watch how they develop speech and language skills. More than 20 MSU students are currently assisting Dilley, transcribing the digitized speech of mothers and examining the patterns, emphasis and phrasing used in talking to children of different ages.
Other members of the research team are Devin McAuley of the MSU Department of Psychology and Tonya Bergeson-Dana of Indiana University.
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