Vowel Production in Prelingually Deafened Mandarin-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants

Area of Science:

• Speech Acoustics
• Auditory Rehabilitation
• Linguistics

Background:

• Cochlear implants (CIs) aim to restore hearing in deafened individuals.
• Speech production, particularly vowel acoustics and intelligibility, can be affected by prelingual deafness and CI use.
• Mandarin-speaking children with CIs require specific analysis due to the tonal and vowel-rich nature of the language.

Purpose of the Study:

• To acoustically characterize vowel productions in prelingually deafened Mandarin-speaking children with CIs.
• To evaluate the intelligibility of these vowel productions.
• To compare acoustic and intelligibility measures with age-matched normal-hearing (NH) children.

Main Methods:

• Acoustic analysis of 20 Mandarin vowels produced by 25 children with CIs and 20 NH children.
• Extraction of first (F1) and second (F2) formants at seven time points for acoustic feature comparison.
• Vowel intelligibility assessment by six NH adult listeners identifying vowel productions from both groups.

Main Results:

• Children with CIs exhibited significant acoustic deviations from NH controls, including longer vowel duration, more scattered vowel categories, and smaller vowel space area.
• Vowel intelligibility was significantly lower in the CI group compared to the NH group.
• Despite differences, the confusion patterns in vowel recognition were similar between the CI and NH children.

Conclusions:

• Prelingually deafened children with CIs demonstrate persistent acoustic deviations and reduced vowel intelligibility, even with extended CI use.
• These findings underscore the complexity of achieving normalized speech production post-CI.
• Further research and targeted interventions may be needed to improve speech outcomes in this population.