Imitative Production of Rising Speech Intonation in Pediatric Cochlear Implant Recipients

Abstract

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...

Voice emotion perception and production in cochlear implant users

“…Furthermore, CI children demonstrate difficulty with perceiving more subtle emotions such as disappointment and surprise (Nakata, et al, 2012). Speech production studies suggest a lack of appropriate pitch contour in conveying questions and/or statements in CI children (Peng, et al, 2008; Peng, et al, 2007; Chin, et al, 2012). Recent preliminary data from Chatterjee et al (2016) illustrates that CI children’s productions of emotional speech incorporate smaller contrasts between happy and sad speech in mean pitch, pitch range, intensity, and spectral centroid compared to NH children.…”

The development of intonation in young children with cochlear implants: a preliminary study of the influence of age at implantation and length of implant experience

“…In particular, f 0 tends to be weakly represented in CIs (Peng, Tomblin, Spencer, & Hurtig, 2007; Kuo, Rosen, & Faulkner, 2008). To investigate the limited representation of f 0 in CIs, Lin, Lee, Huang, & Peng (2007) asked adult Mandarin speakers with NH to identify tones in monosyllabic word productions that acoustically simulated CIs with a different number of channels.…”

“…In Cantonese, for example, a group of 3 children acquired lexical pitch patterns corresponding to the tonal inventory more slowly than they acquired the vowel inventory (Barry, Blamey, Lee, & Cheung, 2000), suggesting that f 0 patterns may be more difficult to acquire than speech sounds. In studies of intonation production, Peng, Tomblin, Spencer, & Hurtig (2007) elicited imitated productions of a rising contour ( yes-no question) from children with a CI. According to the judgments of adults with NH, the children with a CI did not produce the contour accurately.…”

Speech Production Quality of Cochlear Implant Users with Respect to Duration and Onset of Hearing Loss

“…Also, the duration of CI use after late implantation showed no significant influence in these CI users, although one might expect an influence as described by Peng et al [48]. Tanamati et al [49] showed that children with postlingual deafness can achieve high scores of intelligibility: after 10 years of CI use, 8 children received the highest scores and only 2 children received low scores.…”