Basic Measures of Prosody in Spontaneous Speech of Children With Early and Late Cochlear Implantation

Abstract

Purpose Relative to normally hearing (NH) peers, the speech of children with cochlear implants (CIs) has been found to have deviations such as a high fundamental frequency, elevated jitter and shimmer, and inadequate intonation. However, two important dimensions of prosody (temporal and spectral) have not been systematically investigated. Given that, in general, the resolution in CI hearing is best for the temporal dimension and worst for the spectral dimension, we expected this hierarchy to be reflected in the amount of CI speech's deviation from NH speech. Deviations, however, were expected to diminish with increasing device experience. Method Of 9 Dutch early- and late-implanted (division at 2 years of age) children and 12 hearing age-matched NH controls, spontaneous speech was recorded at 18, 24, and 30 months after implantation (CI) or birth (NH). Six spectral and temporal outcome measures were compared between groups, sessions, and genders. Results On most measures, interactions of Group and/or Gender with Session were significant. For CI recipients as compared with controls, performance on temporal measures was not in general more deviant than spectral measures, although differences were found for individual measures. The late-implanted group had a tendency to be closer to the NH group than the early-implanted group. Groups converged over time. Conclusions Results did not support the phonetic dimension hierarchy hypothesis, suggesting that the appropriateness of the production of basic prosodic measures does not depend on auditory resolution. Rather, it seems to depend on the amount of control necessary for speech production.

Age and Gender Differences in Belgian Dutch Intonation

“…Most studies use a spectral, temporal or intensity component to calculate intonation. This corresponds with, respectively, measuring differences in fundamental frequency, duration and intensity within the utterance (Davies & Goldberg, 2006;Fitzsimons et al, 2001;Ladd, 2008;Olivati et al, 2017;van de Velde et al, 2018). Hancock et al (2014) andGelfer andSchofield (2000) used an intonation shift to describe intonation.…”

“…of the utterance as a whole. The script "Intonation and stress trajectory" (Corthals, 2019a;Van Borsel, Vandaele, & Corthals, 2013) was used to calculate this parameter.…”

“…This is the mean size of the upward or downward intonation shift at the end of the The script "Intonation and stress trajectory" (Corthals, 2019a;Van Borsel et al, 2013) was used for this parameter as well. The sum of the absolute value of all fundamental frequency changes between the 5 th and 95 th percentile that occur in the utterance was calculated and divided by the total duration of the utterance, which then indicated the size and speed of the intonation maneuvers.…”

“…Intonation is a suprasegmental speech characteristic and is considered to be part of prosody. It has been described as changes in fundamental frequency, duration and intensity within the utterance (Davies & Goldberg, 2006;Fitzsimons, Sheahan, & Staunton, 2001;Ladd, 2008;Olivati, Assumpção Junior, & Misquiatti, 2017;van de Velde et al, 2018).…”

Similar use of intonation structure in early implanted children and hearing children: The case of Italian

“…In one of the few studies on French-speaking children who had been implanted early, Farah and colleagues (2018) showed that these children acquired adult patterns of prosodic focus and phrasing at a hearing age of about 6 years, similar to children with TH of the same hearing age (for other results on prosody in French children with CI, see Le Normand & Lacheret, 2010). Van de Velde and colleagues (2018) conducted a study on the spontaneous speech produced by Dutch early and late implanted children recorded 18, 24 and 30 months after implantation. The authors took into account both temporal (i.e.…”