Prosodic Focus Acquisition in French Early Cochlear Implanted Children

Abstract

Cochlear implanted (CI) children display an array of speech production and perception problems. No study has evaluated the specific use of prosody regarding information structure in the discourse, in French speaking early CI children. This study aims to evaluate prosody production in these children, to determine whether they show prosodic effect on word duration. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 10 prelingually hearing impaired French speaking children (4-7 years old), without comorbidities, CI before the age of 18 months between 2009 and 2012. The speech production task consisted in playing a computer-based semi-structured game, where children interacted with their caregiver. Results were interpreted according to both chronological age and hearing age (HA). In our series, 6-and 7-year old children (HA<6.2 years) showed stronger lengthening of the focused word in the corrective narrow focus condition than in the contrastive narrow focus which in turn was stronger than in broad focus condition. Only 7-year old children adopted a strategy similar to that of adults, lengthening the end-phrase adjective to preserve the typical phrasing pattern of French. This study shows for the first time that early CI children are able to acquire important intonation structure features comparable to adult patterns.

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

“…We take this result as additional support for early CI implantation, allowing the development of a more typical prosodic competence than what has been observed for deaf or hard of hearing children using other hearing aids or receiving later implantation (Lenden & Flipsen, 2007). Similar results have also been shown for the acquisition of prosodic focus in French in an interactive game with early implanted children (Farah et al, 2018). Nonetheless, to make this conclusion stronger, it would be useful to extend our analysis to deaf children implanted later in development, but with a similar hearing age to that observed here.…”

“…Geers et al, 2003), narratives (Zanchi et al, 2021), and, although less investigated, intonation and prosody (e.g. Farah et al, 2018; Lenden & Flipsen, 2007; Peng et al, 2008).…”