Factors affecting the acquisition of vowel phonemes by pre‐linguistically deafened cochlear implant users learning Cantonese

Abstract

This paper describes the development of vowel inventories in 12 pre-linguistically deafened Cantonese-speaking cochlear implant users. The aim of the research was to understand the role of linguistic, perceptual and articulatory factors in determining the rate and order of vowel acquisition in this population of children. Rate and order of vowel acquisition were reported against two criteria. The "targetless" criterion for production required at least two correct productions of a vowel in a sample of speech. The second or "target" criterion required that a vowel first met the targetless criterion and was further produced correctly in the appropriate phonological context at least 50% of the time. Factors associated with articulatory difficulty were shown to explain the composition of pre-implant vowel inventories. Subsequent to receiving an implant, all children demonstrated a steady and systematic expansion in the size of their vowel inventories though the rate of acquisition varied between individuals. The order of vowel acquisition was affected by a combination of linguistic and articulatory factors. The paper concludes by discussing the clinical implications of these findings for helping children develop good spoken language skills subsequent to receiving an implant.

From 1‐word to 2‐words with cochlear implant and cued speech: A case study

“…Thus, order of acquisition is similar in Blanca and the NH children, but the rate of acquisition is slightly slower in Blanca. These results are similar to those described by other reseachers (see Serry & Blamey, 1999;Barry, Blamey, & Fletcher, 2006). Figure 4 shows the ratio of correct words, mispronounced words, and non-intelligible words.…”

“…The authors found the trend in phone acquisition was the same as that of NH children, though the process occurred at a slower rate. Barry, Blamey, and Fletcher (2006) obtained similar results with Cantonese children implanted at a mean age of 4;5 years.…”

The emergence of productive speech and language in Spanish-learning paediatric cochlear implant users

“…However, it remains unclear up to what point the development of productive speech and language is typical in children implanted at an early age. Some indications of typical, though possibly slow, development are : a typical order of phoneme acquisition (Serry & Blamey, 1999 ;Barry, Blamey & Fletcher, 2006;Moreno-Torres & Torres, 2008); and typical error patterns in the production of consonant clusters (Kim & Chin, 2008 ;Adi-Bensaid & Ben-David, 2010). Furthermore, different researchers have found evidence of either atypical or typical development.…”

Native prosodic systems and learning experience shape production of non-native tones

“…Tone differentiation in each speaker groups' rising tones was expected to cluster closer to the y-axis, as they have higher offsets than onsets, whereas falling tones would cluster closer to the x-axis. An example of this is seen in the tone production of Cantonese by children with cochlear implants [1,2]. In these studies, ellipses were drawn to visualise the space for each tone type.…”

“…Three further analyses have determined how tones were differentiated within the tonal space and among tonemes, based on previous studies [1,2]. The parameters calculated consisted of the axes' lengths, the areas of the tonal ellipses and the distances between the centre points of each ellipsis.…”