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Updated: Jun 1, 2026
Systematic Hearing Performance Evaluation Process for Adolescents with Cochlear Implantation at Early Ages
Published on: March 24, 2023
Effects of Phonotactic Probabilities on the Processing of Spoken Words and Nonwords by Adults with Cochlear Implants
Michael S Vitevitch1, David B Pisoni, Karen Iler Kirk
1Michael S. Vitevitch, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral fellow in the Speech Research Laboratory at Indiana University, is currently assistant professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS. David B. Pisoni, Ph.D., is Chancellors' Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, and adjunct professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN. Karen Iler Kirk, Ph.D., is associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery and Psi Iota Xi Scholar at the Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN. Marcia Hay-McCutcheon, M.A., a former clinical research associate and audiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine, is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. Stacey L. Yount, M.A., a former clinical research associate and audiologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine, is currently an oncology data management coordinator at Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN.
Abstract:
Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the frequency with which segments and sequences of segments occur in syllables and words. Knowledge of phonotactics has been shown to be an important source of information in recognizing spoken words in listeners with normal hearing. Two online tasks (an auditory same-different task and an auditory lexical decision task) were used to examine the use of phonotactic information by adults who were postlingually deafened who have received cochlear implants. The results of the experiments showed that cochlear implant patients with better word recognition abilities (as measured by the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 (NU-6) produced patterns of results that were similar to the pattern of results obtained from listeners with normal hearing in Vitevitch and Luce (1999). This finding suggests that cochlear implant patients with better word recognition abilities use lexical and sublexical representations to process spoken words, much like listeners with normal hearing. In contrast, cochlear implant patients with poor word recognition abilities could not differentiate between stimuli varying in phonotactic probability and lexicality, suggesting that less distinct representations are used by these patients to process spoken words. The implications of these results for outcome assessments and clinical interventions are discussed.
