Production accuracy of word-initial consonants in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the accuracy of consonant production of children with cochlear implants (CIs) judged by naïve adult listeners. A total of 57 Mandarin-speaking children (22 with normal hearing and 35 with CIs) were recruited to produce a list of Mandarin words composed of 17 word-initial obstruent consonants in three different vowel contexts. A total number of 2628 tokens were generated and were divided into 10 subsets. One hundred Mandarin-speaking naïve adult listeners were recruited to identify the consonant productions through Gorilla, the online research platform. Each listener was randomly assigned to one subset. For each child speaker, the consonant productions were judged by 7–12 adult listeners and an average accuracy rate was calculated across all listeners for each consonant. The results revealed that the children with CIs showed lower accuracies and different confusion patterns on their consonant productions than the normal hearing controls. In particular, they demonstrated higher accuracy for stops but had major problems with the fricatives and affricates involved in the alveolar—alveolopalatal—retroflex postalveolar three-way sibilant contrast. Of the three places of the sibilant contrast, they showed the greatest difficulties for the alveolar sounds.