Children's development of intonation during the first year of cochlear implant experience

Abstract

This article describes the longitudinal development of intonation in 18 deaf children who received cochlear implants (CIs) before the age of three years and 12 infants with typical development (TD) who served as controls. At the time their implants were activated, the children with CIs ranged in age from 9 to 36 months. Cross-group comparisons were made when the children had equivalent amounts of robust hearing experience but different chronological ages. This paper reports the results for the 6-month period ending 9 months after activation of the child’s device for children with CIs, and the 6-month period ending at 12 months of age for TD infants. The findings were compared to a model of early intonation development in children with normal hearing. The results indicated that all groups progressed through 1 or more of the stages predicted by the normative model. At the end of the study period, however, children who had received a cochlear implant later than 24 months reached a more mature stage of intonation development than younger CI-recipients. Moreover, the older CI group reached the same stage of development as the TD infants who had 3 additional months of language listening experience. The findings suggest that the developmental advantage which older children had previously demonstrated shortly after activation of their CIs is maintained throughout most or all of the first year of cochlear implant use.

The development of falling intonation in young children with cochlear implants: a 2-year longitudinal study

“…Another child (HAGR) had a secondary disability related to motor speech. Snow and Ertmer (2012) reported that the pattern of intonation development in children with secondary disabilities was similar to that of other CI recipients.…”

“…Visual inspection of the first year of robust hearing shows little resemblance to the corresponding part of the graph for children with NH. This is due to a significant interaction between "age at activation" and amount of robust hearing experiencethe principal finding in the first year of the study (Snow & Ertmer, 2012). As a result of the interaction, the older children progressed more rapidly than the younger groups.…”

“…Twelve children (six boys and six girls) were enrolled in a longitudinal investigation of prelinguistic vocal development following cochlear implantation (Snow & Ertmer, 2012). Background audiometric information can be found in Table 2.…”

Word segmentation in phonemically identical and prosodically different sequences using cochlear implants: A case study

“…Although fine structure information transmitted by CI devices is degraded, prosodic cues are not completely absent (Wilson and Dorman, 2008) and CI users can process auditory prosodic cues to some extent (e.g. Spitzer et al 2009;Meister et al, 2011;Snow and Ertmer, 2012;Segal et al, 2016). Training in this aspect of speech is therefore feasible and needs to be systematically included in rehabilitation programmes.…”

“…Intonational cues also seem to be processed by CI users to some extent. In a longitudinal study, Snow and Ertmer (2012) analyzed the accent range (i.e. the amount of F0 change used in falling or rising contours) during the spontaneous speech production of CI children.…”