The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of acoustic filtering and modality on speech-in-noise recognition for Spanish-English late bilinguals (who were exposed to English after their 5th birthday) and English monolinguals. All speech perception testing was conducted in English....
✦ The floor
Discussion
Signed responses from readers of the wire.
Audiologists fitting bilingual patients should be aware that low-frequency filtered speech (simulating mild high-frequency hearing loss) may disproportionately reduce speech-in-noise performance for late bilinguals, and that visual cues may provide differential benefit — but await larger controlled studies before changing fitting protocols.
As audiology increasingly serves diverse multilingual populations, understanding how language background interacts with acoustic degradation and audiovisual processing is essential for equitable hearing assessment and rehabilitation.
- 01Low-pass filtering (muffling high-frequency sounds) reduced English speech-in-noise recognition in both groups.
- 02Spanish-English late bilinguals showed different speech-in-noise recognition patterns compared to English monolinguals under filtered conditions.
- 03Audiovisual (seeing + hearing) modality improved performance relative to auditory-only for both groups.
- 04Findings have implications for how audiologists assess and counsel bilingual patients with hearing difficulties.
- 05Published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge).
Low-pass acoustic filtering reduces English speech-in-noise recognition for both late bilinguals and monolinguals.
studysupportedSpanish-English late bilinguals perform differently from monolinguals on English speech-in-noise tasks under filtered conditions.
studypartially supportedAudiovisual cues (lip-reading) improve speech-in-noise recognition compared to auditory-only presentation.
studysupported- PMID
- 42959825
- DOI
- 10.1017/s1366728925100096.
- Journal
- Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
- Publication type
- research_article
- Evidence level
- 2b
- Population
- Spanish-English late bilinguals and English monolinguals with normal or corrected hearing
- Intervention
- Low-pass acoustic filtering of English speech stimuli in auditory-only and audiovisual modalities
- Comparator
- Unfiltered speech; monolingual listeners
Primary outcomes
English speech-in-noise recognition accuracy; Modality effect (audiovisual vs. auditory-only) on recognition scores