As a group, pediatric CI recipients do not show mastery of speech intonation in their production or perception to the same extent as their NH peers. Pediatric CI recipients' performance levels in the production and perception of speech intonation contrasts are moderately correlated. Intersubject variability exists in pediatric CI recipients' mastery levels in the production and perception of speech intonation contrasts. These findings suggest the importance of addressing both aspects (production and perception) of speech intonation in the aural rehabilitation and speech intervention programs for prelingually deafened children and young adults who use a CI.
Speech intelligibility of 24 prelingually deaf pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients with 84 months of device experience was investigated. Each CI participant's speech samples were judged by a panel of 3 listeners. Intelligibility scores were calculated as the average of the 3 listeners' responses. The average write-down intelligibility score was 71.54% (SD = 29.89), and the average rating-scale intelligibility score was 3.03 points (SD = 1.01). Write-down and rating-scale intelligibility scores were highly correlated (r = .91, p < .001). Linear regression analyses revealed that both age at implantation and different speech-coding strategies contribute to the variability of CI participants' speech intelligibility. Implantation at a younger age and the use of the spectralpeak speech-coding strategy yielded higher intelligibility scores than implantation at an older age and the use of the multipeak speech-coding strategy. These results serve as indices for clinical applications when long-term advancements in spoken-language development are considered for pediatric CI recipients.Keywords cochlear implants; speech intelligibility; speech development; speech production Acochlear implant (CI) is an auditory prosthesis that electrically stimulates the primary auditory nerve fibers to elicit sound perception in individuals with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing impairments. A substantial number of studies have demonstrated that the use of CIs can facilitate the development of speech and language skills of children who are prelingually deaf (born deaf or become deaf before age 3; e.g., Blamey, Barry, & Jacq, 2001;Geers & Tobey, 1995;Serry & Blamey, 1999;Serry, Blamey, & Grogan, 1997;Spencer, Tye-Murray, & Tomblin, 1998;Svirsky, Robbins, Kirk, Pisoni, & Miyamoto, 2000;Tobey, Geers, Brenner, Altuna, & Gabbert, 2003;Tomblin, Spencer, Flock, Tyler, & Gantz, 1999;Tye-Murray & Kirk, 1993;Tye-Murray, Spencer, & Woodworth, 1995). Some investigators have also studied postimplant speech development by applying speech intelligibility measures (e.g., Chin, Finnegan, & Chung, 2001;Chin, Tsai, & Gao, 2003;Miyamoto, Kirk, Robbins, Todd, & Riley, 1996;Moog & Geers, 1999;Osberger, Robbins, Todd, & Riley, 1994;Svirsky & Chin, 2000;Tobey et al., 2003;Tobey & Hasenstab, 1991). The term "speech intelligibility" refers to the degree to which a speaker's intended message can be recovered by other listeners (Bunton, Kent, Kent, & Duffy, 2001). Speech intelligibility is a joint product of a speaker and a listener and can provide a close approximation of an individual's everyday communication status with regard to how well the individual can be understood by other listeners (Kent, Miolo, & Bloedel, 1994 reason, speech intelligibility measures tend to be relatively holistic and are distinct from many other clinical measures of speech production skills that intend to determine an individual's discreet phoneme accuracy.Although individual intelligibility scores vary greatly from 0% to approximately 80% in the speech production of...
Purpose This study characterized the development of speech sound production in prelingually deaf children with a minimum of 8 years of cochlear implant (CI) experience. Method Twenty-seven pediatric CI recipients' spontaneous speech samples from annual evaluation sessions were phonemically transcribed. Accuracy for these speech samples was evaluated in piecewise regression models. Results As a group, pediatric CI recipients showed steady improvement in speech sound production following implantation, but the improvement rate declined after 6 years of device experience. Piecewise regression models indicated that the slope estimating the participants' improvement rate was statistically greater than 0 during the first 6 years postimplantation, but not after 6 years. The group of pediatric CI recipients' accuracy of speech sound production after 4 years of device experience reasonably predicts their speech sound production after 5–10 years of device experience. Conclusions The development of speech sound production in prelingually deaf children stabilizes after 6 years of device experience, and typically approaches a plateau by 8 years of device use. Early growth in speech before 4 years of device experience did not predict later rates of growth or levels of achievement. However, good predictions could be made after 4 years of device use.
Purpose-This study investigated the acoustic characteristics of pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients' imitative production of rising speech intonation, in relation to the perceptual judgments by listeners with normal hearing (NH).Method-Recordings of a yes-no interrogative utterance imitated by 24 prelingually deafened children with a CI were extracted from annual evaluation sessions. These utterances were perceptually judged by adult NH listeners in regard with intonation contour type (non-rise, partialrise, or full-rise) and contour appropriateness (on a 5-point scale). Fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration properties of each utterance were also acoustically analyzed.Results-Adult NH listeners' judgments of intonation contour type and contour appropriateness for each CI participant 's utterances were highly positively correlated. The pediatric CI recipients did not consistently use appropriate intonation contours when imitating a yes-no question. Acoustic properties of speech intonation produced by these individuals were discernible among utterances of different intonation contour types according to NH listeners' perceptual judgments.Conclusions-These findings delineated the perceptual and acoustic characteristics of speech intonation imitated by prelingually deafened children and young adults with a CI. Future studies should address whether the degraded signals these individuals perceive via a CI contribute to their difficulties with speech intonation production. Keywords cochlear implants; speech intonation; speech development; prosody; acoustic analysis Acochlear implant (CI) is an auditory prosthetic device that is surgically implanted in the inner ear and stimulates primary auditory nerve fibers to elicit sound sensation in individuals with a severe-profound sensorineural hearing loss. These devices are fairly successful in facilitating the spoken language development in prelingually deafened children. However, current CI devices are limited in encoding fundamental frequency (F0), that is, voice pitch information (Faulkner, Rosen, & Smith, 2000;Geurts & Wouters, 2001;Green, Faulkner, & Rosen, 2004). Such voice pitch variation is critical for the recognition of prosodic components of speech that mark linguistic contrasts, such as lexical tones, stress, and speech intonation (Ladd, 1996;Lehiste, 1970Lehiste, , 1976. Because current CI devices provide only restricted access for the recognition of prosodic components of speech that signify linguistic contrasts, these devices can be limited in facilitating the acquisition of the prosodic NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscriptcomponents, that is, lexical tones and speech intonation in prelingually deafened children who must rely on a CI to develop spoken language.Prosodic components of speech are referred to as the perceptual and acoustic realizations at the suprasegmental level of speech (Lehiste, 1970). Variation in prosodic components of speech can have various expressive functions in semantic, attit...
Purpose: This study examined the utilization of multiple types of acoustic information in lexical tone production and perception by pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients who are native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Methods: Lexical tones were recorded from CI recipients and their peers with normal hearing (NH). Each participant was asked to produce a disyllabic word, yan jing , with which the first syllable was pronounced as Tone 3 (a low dipping tone) while the second syllable was pronounced as Tone 1 (a high level tone, meaning “eyes”) or as Tone 4 (a high falling tone, meaning “eyeglasses”). In addition, a parametric manipulation in fundamental frequency (F0) and duration of Tones 1 and 4 used in a lexical tone recognition task in Peng et al. (2017) was adopted to evaluate the perceptual reliance on each dimension. Results: Mixed-effect analyses of duration, intensity, and F0 cues revealed that NH children focused exclusively on marking distinct F0 contours, while CI participants shortened Tone 4 or prolonged Tone 1 to enhance their contrast. In line with these production strategies, NH children relied primarily on F0 cues to identify the two tones, whereas CI children showed greater reliance on duration cues. Moreover, CI participants who placed greater perceptual weight on duration cues also tended to exhibit smaller changes in their F0 production. Conclusion: Pediatric CI recipients appear to contrast the secondary acoustic dimension (duration) in addition to F0 contours for both lexical tone production and perception. These findings suggest that perception and production strategies of lexical tones are well coupled in this pediatric CI population.
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