Abstract
The aim of this study was to examine the abilities of eight early-implanted children with cochlear implants (mean age 7.1 years) to produce contrastive stress and to compare their use of amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency, to an age-matched group of children with typical hearing (mean age 6.11 years). A set of 16 utterances were elicited in which the child was required to stress either an adjective or noun in a short phrase. Although both groups of children produced similar proportions of utterances with stress patterns perceived by hearing listeners as accurate, they employed different strategies for achieving contrastive stress.
Highlights
An important aspect of prosody is sentence stress, or the prominence of individual words within a sentence (Meister et al, 2009)
Cochlear implants (CIs) have provided children with unprecedented access to speech, but the devices are limited in the type of acoustic information that is provided to the listener
The group had considerably less implant experience that the participants in the present study and only 5/17 children with CIs (CWCI) were implanted before 3 years of age
Summary
An important aspect of prosody is sentence stress, or the prominence of individual words within a sentence (Meister et al, 2009). Sentence stress in adults’ speech can be used to show contrastive focus, and can convey significant information about the intention of the speaker (Buring, 2012). The production of contrastive stress in adults is the result of altering three main acoustic elements: amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency (F0) (Meister et al, 2009). Children with significant hearing loss have benefited considerably from cochlear implant (CI) technology [for example, Niparko et al(2010) and Sharma et al (2020)]. Cochlear implants (CIs) have provided children with unprecedented access to speech, but the devices are limited in the type of acoustic information that is provided to the listener. CIs maintain the essential frequency organization of the cochlea (lower frequencies near the apex, higher frequency information near the base), providing an approximation of the auditory information that would be provided by an intact cochlea to the auditory nerve
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