Vowel Production of Mandarin-Speaking Children with Cochlear Implants
Mentor 1
Jing Yang
Start Date
16-4-2021 12:00 AM
Description
Spoken language is acquired through the use of language and the auditory awareness of one’s own speech. This process of learning is hindered by hearing impairments. The cochlear implant (CI) is an auditory prosthesis that provides electrical hearing to listeners with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss that is caused by damage to the inner ear or acoustic nerve. CI devices greatly improve the speech and language development in prelingually deafened children. Compared to normal hearing (NH) peers, the speech intelligibility of children with CIs is still lower than NH children. The purpose of our research is to examine the production of single vowel sounds by Mandarin-speaking children with CIs. Two groups of children (20 NH and 25 CI) aged between 4.5 and 10 were recruited. The speech materials included a list of Mandarin disyllabic or trisyllabic words. A visual-auditory repetition task was used to elicit speech samples. Each child was asked to repeat the target word presented as an image on a computer screen, followed by an audio prompt produced by a Mandarin-speaking adult. A time-frequency analysis program, TF32, was used to track formants of the target vowel located in the first syllable of each word. Formants represent the vocal tract resonance. The vowels’ acoustic features including the formant frequency values of the first two formants were used to plot the vowel dispersion and to calculate vowel space area. The results revealed that the children with CIs demonstrated deviations from the NH controls in spectral features of the tested single vowels. In addition, the children with CIs produced significantly smaller vowel space area than the NH controls. These findings will help researchers and clinicians better understand the deficits and difficulty of speech production in children with CIs and design a more targeted plan for oral rehabilitation.
Vowel Production of Mandarin-Speaking Children with Cochlear Implants
Spoken language is acquired through the use of language and the auditory awareness of one’s own speech. This process of learning is hindered by hearing impairments. The cochlear implant (CI) is an auditory prosthesis that provides electrical hearing to listeners with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss that is caused by damage to the inner ear or acoustic nerve. CI devices greatly improve the speech and language development in prelingually deafened children. Compared to normal hearing (NH) peers, the speech intelligibility of children with CIs is still lower than NH children. The purpose of our research is to examine the production of single vowel sounds by Mandarin-speaking children with CIs. Two groups of children (20 NH and 25 CI) aged between 4.5 and 10 were recruited. The speech materials included a list of Mandarin disyllabic or trisyllabic words. A visual-auditory repetition task was used to elicit speech samples. Each child was asked to repeat the target word presented as an image on a computer screen, followed by an audio prompt produced by a Mandarin-speaking adult. A time-frequency analysis program, TF32, was used to track formants of the target vowel located in the first syllable of each word. Formants represent the vocal tract resonance. The vowels’ acoustic features including the formant frequency values of the first two formants were used to plot the vowel dispersion and to calculate vowel space area. The results revealed that the children with CIs demonstrated deviations from the NH controls in spectral features of the tested single vowels. In addition, the children with CIs produced significantly smaller vowel space area than the NH controls. These findings will help researchers and clinicians better understand the deficits and difficulty of speech production in children with CIs and design a more targeted plan for oral rehabilitation.
