• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.117-123
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• 2011

Most individuals with hearing impairment have difficulty in understanding speech in noisy situations. This study was conducted to investigate sentence recognition ability using the Korean Standard-Sentence Lists for Preschoolers (KS-SL-P2) in pre-school age children with cochlear implants and hearing aids. The subjects of this study were 10 pre-school age children with hearing aids, 12 pre-school age children with cochlear implants, and 10 pre-school age children with normal hearing. Three kinds of signal-to-noise (SNR) conditions (+10 dB, +5 dB, 0 dB) were applied. The results for all pre-school age children with cochlear implants and hearing aids presented a significant increase in the score for sentence recognition as SNR increased. The sentence recognition score in speech noise were obtained with the SNR +10 dB. Significant differences existed between groups in terms of their sentence recognition ability, with the cochlear implant group performing better than the hearing aid group. These findings suggest the presence of a sentence recognition test using speech noise is useful for evaluating pre-school age children's listening skill.