Competitive listening scenarios for children with cochlear implants: effects of noise and face masks on speech intelligibility

Optimal acoustics is needed to ensure understanding, especially for hearing-impaired (HI) listeners. This is even more important when the HI listeners are young children equipped with cochlear implants who need the speech to be intelligible in order to learn. During the Covid-19 pandemic, wearing face masks became a norm to avoid the spreading of infections. Therefore, listening for HI children became an increasingly challenging task. This study involved an experimental group of 14 children with cochlear implants aged 7-to-15 years and a control group of six normal hearing children, with the objective of investigating on the influence of different typologies of face masks on speech intelligibility (SI, as percentage of items correctly understood using the Simplified Italian Matrix Sentence Test) and listening difficulty (LD, rated on a 5-points scale) under competitive listening scenarios. Three types of face masks, with different intrinsic characteristics, and three signal-to-noise ratios were considered. Scenarios with a lower signal-to-noise ratio corresponded to lower SI, as expected, and SI without mask was similar to that obtained with the mask with the lowest acoustic attenuation, albeit with a low filtration efficiency. These preliminary outcomes help to improve speech communication strategies in classrooms to support optimal listening conditions.