Effect of cochlear implants on children’s perception and production of speech prosody

Abstract

Japanese 5- to 13-yr-olds who used cochlear implants (CIs) and a comparison group of normally hearing (NH) Japanese children were tested on their perception and production of speech prosody. For the perception task, they were required to judge whether semantically neutral utterances that were normalized for amplitude were spoken in a happy, sad, or angry manner. The performance of NH children was error-free. By contrast, child CI users performed well below ceiling but above chance levels on happy- and sad-sounding utterances but not on angry-sounding utterances. For the production task, children were required to imitate stereotyped Japanese utterances expressing disappointment and surprise as well as culturally typically representations of crow and cat sounds. NH 5- and 6-year-olds produced significantly poorer imitations than older hearing children, but age was unrelated to the imitation quality of child CI users. Overall, child CI user's imitations were significantly poorer than those of NH children, but they did not differ significantly from the imitations of the youngest NH group. Moreover, there was a robust correlation between the performance of child CI users on the perception and production tasks; this implies that difficulties with prosodic perception underlie their difficulties with prosodic imitation.

Spontaneous vocal matching in mothers and their hearing impaired infants with cochlear implants : a quantitative analysis.

“…This finding both supports and extends upon previous literature that has shown that imitation is problematic for children with hearing loss (Chin et al, 2012;Cleary et al, 2002;Dillon et al, 2004;Ertmer & Goffman, 2011;Ertmer et al, 1997;Nakata et al, 2012;Peng et al, 2008;Sehgal et al, 1998). For example, children with hearing loss have been shown to have difficulty producing exact imitations of non-words, and their attempted repetitions tended to have fewer syllables as compared to the target (Cleary et al, 2002;Dillon et al, 2004).…”

“…Although this study did not examine what vowels and consonants NH and HI groups imitated, the findings of this study add to the previous studies (Chin et al, 2012;Cleary et al, 2002;Dillon et al, 2004;Ertmer & Goffman, 2011;Ertmer et al, 1997;Nakata et al, 2012;Peng et al, 2008;Sehgal et al, 1998) by showing that the quantity of utterances with matched sounds is affected by infant hearing status.…”

“…Previous studies suggest that imitation abilities are negatively affected in infants with HI (Chin, Bergeson, & Phan, 2012;Dillon, Cleary, Pisoni, & Carter, 2004;Ertmer & Goffman, 2011;Ertmer, Kirk, Sehgal, Riley, & Osberger, 1997;Nakata, Trehub, & Kanda, 2012;Peng, Tomblin, & Turner, 2008;Sehgal, Kirk, Svirsky, Ertmer, & Osberger, 1998). While there is very little past research that investigates naturalistic vocal imitation in hearing impaired infants, there are several studies that looked at imitative abilities of older children with cochlear implants (CIs) by using both non-word and whole word repetition tasks in laboratory settings.…”

“…shown that vocal imitation is problematic for HI infants (Chin et al, 2012;Dillon et al, 2004;Ertmer & Goffman, 2011;Ertmer et al, 1997;Nakata et al, 2012;Peng et al, 2008;Sehgal et al, 1998), indicating that in spontaneous vocal imitation, HI infants will likely imitate less compared to normal hearing peers. Past research has shown that maternal behavior is affected by hearing loss (Bergeson, 2011;Cheskin, 1981;Fagan et al, 2014;Goss, 1970;Henggeler & Cooper, 1983;Koester et al, 1998 Surgery.…”

The Effects of Musical Experience and Hearing Loss on Solving an Audio-Based Gaming Task

“…Much of the recent research on music with hearing loss has focused on the emerging technologies related to cochlear implants, while some studies look particularly at hearing loss with just hearing aids, such as in the description of how people with hearing aids listen to music from an audiological perspective [34,35]. Music perception by cochlear implant users has been observed both by otolaryngology laboratories [36][37][38] and by psychologists' groups [39,40].…”