Speech production accuracy of children with auditory brainstem implants: A comparison with peers with cochlear implants and typical hearing using Levenshtein Distance

Auditory brainstem implantation (ABI) is a recent innovation in pediatric hearing restoration in children with a sensorineural hearing impairment. Only limited information is available on the spontaneous speech development of severe-to-profound congenitally hearing-impaired children who received an ABI. The purpose of this study was to investigate longitudinally the accuracy of ABI children's word productions in spontaneous speech in comparison to the accuracy of children who received a cochlear implant and children with normal hearing. The data of this study consist of recordings of the spontaneous speech of the first three Dutch-speaking children living in Belgium who received an ABI. The children's utterances were phonemically transcribed and for each word, the distance between the child's production and the standard adult phonemic transcription was computed using the Levenshtein Distance as a metric. The same procedure was applied to the longitudinal data of the children with CI and the normally hearing children. The main result was that the Levenshtein Distance decreased in the three children with ABI but it remained significantly higher than that of children with typical hearing and cochlear implants matched on chronological age, hearing age, and lexicon size. In other words, the phonemic accuracy increased in the children with ABI but stayed well below that of children without hearing loss and children with cochlear implants. Moreover, the analyses revealed considerable individual variation between the children with ABI.