Spoken Vowel Productions in Children with Cochlear Implants and Normal Hearing
Mentor 1
Jing Yang
Start Date
28-4-2023 12:00 AM
Description
The cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted auditory prosthesis device for individuals with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. It improves speech and language development in prelingually deafened children. However, compared to normal hearing (NH) peers, children with CIs still show lower speech intelligibility. The purpose of this study is to examine the acoustic characteristics of vowel productions in English-speaking children with CIs with reference to children with normal hearing (NH). The speech samples were 40 phrases each consisting of six syllables that were structured to have either a strong-weak or weak-strong repeating stress pattern. The participants included 54 CI participants and 23 NH participants. All participants were recorded in a silent room. For each phrase, a prompt was produced by a NH native-English adult speaker and the children were required to repeat what they heard. Of the 40 phrases, words containing English monophthongal vowels in the stressed position were segmented and landmark locations of vowel onset and vowel offset were measured using a spectrogram analysis software. TF32, a time-frequency evaluation software, was used to track the first two formants (F1 and F2) at five equidistant time locations over the course of vowel duration for each target vowel. Vowel normalization was implemented to eliminate the effect of varying vocal tract size on formant frequency values. Compared to NH peers, the children with CIs showed smaller vowel space area and more scattered vowel productions for each vowel category. Overall, this study provides informative data regarding speech characteristics in children with CIs.
Spoken Vowel Productions in Children with Cochlear Implants and Normal Hearing
The cochlear implant (CI) is a surgically implanted auditory prosthesis device for individuals with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. It improves speech and language development in prelingually deafened children. However, compared to normal hearing (NH) peers, children with CIs still show lower speech intelligibility. The purpose of this study is to examine the acoustic characteristics of vowel productions in English-speaking children with CIs with reference to children with normal hearing (NH). The speech samples were 40 phrases each consisting of six syllables that were structured to have either a strong-weak or weak-strong repeating stress pattern. The participants included 54 CI participants and 23 NH participants. All participants were recorded in a silent room. For each phrase, a prompt was produced by a NH native-English adult speaker and the children were required to repeat what they heard. Of the 40 phrases, words containing English monophthongal vowels in the stressed position were segmented and landmark locations of vowel onset and vowel offset were measured using a spectrogram analysis software. TF32, a time-frequency evaluation software, was used to track the first two formants (F1 and F2) at five equidistant time locations over the course of vowel duration for each target vowel. Vowel normalization was implemented to eliminate the effect of varying vocal tract size on formant frequency values. Compared to NH peers, the children with CIs showed smaller vowel space area and more scattered vowel productions for each vowel category. Overall, this study provides informative data regarding speech characteristics in children with CIs.
