Related Experiment Videos
Tone production in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants: a preliminary study
Li Xu1, Yongxin Li, Jianping Hao
1School of Hearing, Speech and Language Sciences, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA. xul@ohio.edu
Acta Oto-Laryngologica
|July 1, 2004
Summary
Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) show impaired tone production, impacting communication in tonal languages. Current CI technology may limit pitch information crucial for developing lexical tone. Further research is needed.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Audiology
- Speech-Language Pathology
Background:
- Tone languages, like Mandarin Chinese, use pitch to distinguish word meanings.
- Over a quarter of the global population speaks tonal languages.
- Understanding tone production in children with cochlear implants (CIs) is crucial for their communication development.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the acoustic characteristics and intelligibility of tone production in Mandarin-speaking children using CIs.
- To compare tone production in children with CIs to their normal-hearing peers.
Main Methods:
- Acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency contours in speech samples from children aged 4-9 years (7 normal-hearing, 4 CI users).
- Tone intelligibility testing by native Mandarin-speaking adults evaluating children's speech samples.
Main Results:
- Normal-hearing children demonstrated accurate production of Mandarin's four lexical tones.
- Children with CIs exhibited predominantly flat or irregular tone patterns.
- Intelligibility tests revealed degraded tone perception for speech produced by children with CIs.
Conclusions:
- Prelingually deafened children using CIs may experience speech development deficits, specifically in tonal production.
- Limited pitch information from current CI stimulation likely contributes to imperfect tone production.
- Findings highlight implications for communication in tone languages and suggest further research into factors affecting tone development in CI users.