Perception of Mandarin Chinese vowels in young hearing-impaired and normal-hearing children

Abstract

The study investigated the perception of Mandarin Chinese vowels of 45 congenital hearing-impaired and 45 normal-hearing children aged 4 to 6. There were 30 children at each age group, half of which were hearing-impaired children. All of the hearing-impaired children received hearing aids or cochlear implants before the age of 5. In a picture identification task, listeners identified the target consonant-vowel word among 2–4 contrastive words. The target words and the other contrastive words differed only in consonants. Each target word represented a concrete object and was spoken by a young female native-Chinese talker. Sixteen of the target words ended with monophthong, twenty-two with diphthong and nine with triphthong. Age showed a significant effect on vowel perception for both groups. Normal-hearing children showed significantly better identification of all three types of vowels than hearing-impaired children at the age of 6, whereas the two groups had comparable performance at age of 4 and 5. For hearing-impaired children, a rapid development of diphthong perception occurred between 4 and 5 years old, while a rapid development of monophthong perception between 5 and 6. The effect of hearing loss severity and the use of hearing aids or cochlear implants will be discussed.