Acoustic characteristics of the voice of children with cochlear implant

Congenital profound bilateral hearing loss prevents the correct development of speech and voice. This study assesses certain acoustic parameters of the voice in order to determine their normality in the implanted population.

Two population groups were studied. A control group consisting of 42 healthy pediatric patients, 22 boys and 20 girls, and a group of 22 pediatric patients, 11 boys and 11 girls with congenital profound hearing loss implanted bilaterally. The variables median pitch, CPPS, jitter rap and shimmer apq5 were evaluated in an isolated phonation exercise and another in connected speech for the phoneme /a/ with the PRAAT program. Student's t-test and Wilcoxcon tests were applied.

Significant intergroup differences were obtained for all variables in the vowel extracted from connected speech, but not in the sustained vowel. The hearing-impaired population showed some significant differences in the intra-group analysis. The experimental group showed better results in the vocal quality parameters, particularly jitter, shimmer and CPPS showed statistically significant differences.

Early bilateral implantation allows the cochlear implant user to approximate his acoustic values ​​to normative values ​​in terms of pitch, stability, quality and articulatory precision.