An investigation of weak syllable processing in deaf children with cochlear implants

Abstract

In this study the influence of prosodic foot structure on the processing of weak syllables in children with cochlear implants (CI) was investigated. A battery of tests investigating processing of weak syllables in single and multi-word utterances was carried out on four groups of children: 15 children with CI developing spoken language as expected (Main CI); five children with CI reported to have additional speech and language problems; 15 age matched; and 15 language matched (LM) children with normal hearing (NH). Children in the main CI and, to a lesser extent, the LM groups processed footed weak syllables preferably over unfooted weak syllables (particularly as memory load increased). Thus, these children with CI appear to possess a similar Prosodic Hierarchy (PH) to their LM peers with NH, and possibly due to the impact of delayed and constrained exposure to audition on the development of linguistic processing and short-term memory, are influenced by its foot structure in the processing of weak syllables.

The emergence of productive speech and language in Spanish-learning paediatric cochlear implant users

“…These results provide further evidence that CI recipients tend to develop typical prosodic representations (Titterington, Henry, Kramer, Toner & Stevenson, 2006 ;Kim & Chin, 2008). The examination of truncation revealed that, despite being a relatively infrequent phenomenon, whenever CI users truncated long words, they adapted them to typical prosodic structures.…”

The perception of prosody and associated auditory cues in early-implanted children: The role of auditory working memory and musical activities

“…Despite the importance of prosodic stress for the segmentation of speech, there are only a handful of studies assessing prosodic stress perception in children with CIs (Word and sentence stress: Klieve & Jeanes, 2001;Most & Peled, 2007;O ' Halpin, 2010. Word stress: Lyxell et al, 2009, Titterington et al, 2006. Imitation of word stress patterns: Carter et al, 2002).…”

Prosodic and Phonological Ability in Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Children with Hearing Impairment: In the Context of Word and Nonword Repetition

“…This mainly affects the ability to perceive fundamental frequency and amplitude, while per-ception of duration is not as constrained (Moore, 2003). Potentially, there are detrimental effects on the acquisition of all aspects of auditorily based learning, including the acquisition of consonants and vowels (Geers, 2003), intonation (Peng, Tomblin, & Turner, 2008), stress in words and sentences (Titterington, Henry, Krämer, Toner, & Stevenson, 2006;Torppa et al, 2014), affective prosody (Nakata, Trehub, & Kanda, 2012), as well as music (Limb & Roy, 2014). Although fundamental frequency is presumed to be the most important cue to stress and intonation, there is research that suggests that duration can provide CI users with important cues to such prosodic features (Hegarty & Faulkner, 2013).…”

“…Based on correlational analyses, early implantation and long-time use of the CI emerged as beneficial factors for prosodic ability (Moein et al, 2017). Titterington et al (2006) investigated the effect of prosodic position on the processing of unstressed syllables in 20 children with CI aged around 8-12 years of age, out of which 15 were developing language as expected, and five had confirmed concurrent speech and language difficulties. Controls with NH, matched for either chronological or language age, were also included.…”

“…Further, all speech and language measures were significantly correlated with the processing of unstressed syllables, and regression analyses indicated that grammatical morpheme use significantly predicted the use of unstressed syllables outside of the trochaic foot. This could indicate that the ability to perceive and produce such syllables is important for the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in English (Titterington et al, 2006). Holt, Demuth and Yuen (2016) examined the use of prosodic cues in a study of individuals with CI, aged 13-18 years.…”