Imitation of nonwords by hearing impaired children with cochlear implants: suprasegmental analyses

In this study, we examined two prosodic characteristics of speech production in 8-10-year-old experienced cochlear implant (CI) users who completed a nonword repetition task. We looked at how often they correctly reproduced syllable number and primary stress location in their responses. Although only 5% of all nonword imitations were produced correctly without errors, 64% of the imitations contained the correct syllable number and 61% had the correct placement of primary stress. Moreover, these target prosodic properties were correctly preserved significantly more often for targets with fewer syllables and targets with primary stress on the initial syllable. Syllable and stress scores were significantly correlated with measures of speech perception, intelligibility, perceived accuracy, and working memory. These findings suggest that paediatric CI users encode the overall prosodic envelope of nonword patterns, despite the loss of more detailed segmental properties. This phonological knowledge is also reflected in other language and memory skills.