Mothers' Speech to Hearing‐Impaired Infants and Children With Cochlear Implants

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of age, hearing loss, and cochlear implantation on mothers' speech to infants and children. We recorded normal-hearing (NH) mothers speaking to their children as they typically would do at home and speaking to an adult experimenter. Nine infants (10-37 months) were hearing-impaired and had used a cochlear implant (CI) for 3 to 18 months. Eighteen NH infants and children were matched either by chronological age (10-37 months) or hearing experience (3-18 months) to the CI children. Prosodic characteristics such as fundamental frequency, utterance duration, and pause duration were measured across utterances in the speech samples. The results revealed that mothers use a typical infant-directed speech style when speaking to hearing-impaired children with CIS. The results also suggested that NH mothers speak with more similar vocal styles to NH children and hearing-impaired children with CIS when matched by hearing experience rather than chronological age. Thus, mothers are sensitive to hearing experience and linguistic abilities of their NH children as well as hearing-impaired children with CIS.

Effects of deafness on acoustic characteristics of American English tense/lax vowels in maternal speech to infants

“…This is consistent with previous studies suggesting slower speaking rate in ID relative to AD speech (Bergeson et al, 2006;Liu et al, 2009). Surprisingly, the duration of the vowel /U/ was not different across the registers.…”

“…In one case study (two participants, twins), the mother decreased the vowel space in speech to her hearing-impaired infant who had hearing aids relative to the normal-hearing twin brother (Lam and Kitamura, 2010). In general, the results of several other studies that examined acoustic characteristics (e.g., prosody) of mothers' speech to hearing-impaired infants fitted with cochlear implants suggest that mothers are sensitive to the hearing abilities of their infants and adjust their speech style depending on the amount of an infant's hearing experience with speech rather than the infant's chronological age (Bergeson et al, 2006;Kondaurova and Bergeson, 2011).…”

Vowel Space Characteristics of Speech Directed to Children With and Without Hearing Loss

“…These acoustic properties of speech to children with hearing impairment were then compared with those produced in speech to children with normal hearing, matched by either chronological age or hearing experience, and to an adult experimenter. This study design permitted a determination of whether mothers tailor their speech input to the amount of hearing experience of a child with hearing impairment, as has been found in previous studies (Bergeson et al, 2006;Kondaurova & Bergeson, 2011;Kondaurova et al, 2013). We predicted that the acoustic properties of the point vowels /i/, /A/, and /u/ would be more distinctive in ID than in AD speech in the population with normal hearing (Burnham et al, 2002;Kuhl et al, 1997;Liu et al, 2003Liu et al, , 2009Uther et al, 2007).…”

“…Despite evidence regarding the importance of ID speech for development in children with normal hearing, researchers have only recently started to examine the properties of linguistic input to children with hearing loss (Bergeson, Miller, & McCune, 2006;Kondaurova & Bergeson, 2011;Kondaurova, Bergeson, & Dilley, 2012;Kondaurova, Bergeson, & Xu, 2013;C. Lam & Kitamura, 2010).…”

“…For this reason, mothers might face greater demand for engaging and maintaining the attention of children with hearing impairment, which could be achieved by sacrificing vowel space expansion in favor of acoustic characteristics of ID speech that function primarily to modulate children's attention (e.g., pitch, vowel duration, speech rate; C. Lam & Kitamura, 2012). Recent research also suggests that mothers adjust prosodic characteristics of their speech to their child with hearing impairment on the basis of the child's amount of hearing experience rather than the child's chronological age (Bergeson et al, 2006;Kondaurova & Bergeson, 2011;Kondaurova et al, 2013). However, mothers also produced more syllables in speech overall to both age-matched and experiencematched children than to the children's peers with hearing impairment at 3, 6, and 12 months after cochlear implantation.…”