Syllable production in hard-of-hearing preschoolers

Abstract

Expressive language in preschoolers has been shown to be positively related to later language development, although not all studies have shown robust effects. Most studies that consider sex have shown that girls develop expressive language earlier than boys. It has also been widely demonstrated that children with a variety of speech-, language-, and hearing-related disorders show deficits in expressive language skills. Children with hearing loss in particular have shown deficits in consonant production, prosodic control, vowel duration, and mean length of utterance. This study examines the expressive language of preschool children with hearing loss using estimates of syllable production from 366 daylong audio recordings totaling over 4348 h of audio processed with unsupervised automatic speech processing techniques. We found no main effect of sex, but typically-developing children were more voluble on average. Unexpectedly, an interaction effect suggests that typically developing boys may be driving the observed differences. This work adds to the evidence of social and biological variability in the speech production of children, and is further proof-of-concept of developmental speech production work using massive data sets and automatic analysis methods.