The development of intonation in young children with cochlear implants: a preliminary study of the influence of age at implantation and length of implant experience

Abstract

This study describes the development of emerging intonation in six children who had received a cochlear implant (CI) before the age of three years. At the time their implant was activated, the children ranged in age from 11 to 37 months. Spontaneous longitudinal speech samples were recorded from 30-minute sessions in which the child interacted with his or her mother. Data were collected 2 months before activation of each child's CI and at monthly intervals after activation for 6 months. The findings were compared to the typical pattern of early intonation development in children with normal hearing (NH). The results suggested that young CI recipients progress through stages similar to those observed in children with NH. However, the intonation development of children with a CI reflects a marked interaction between chronological age at implantation and amount of CI experience. That is, after 2 months of CI-assisted hearing experience, the older children demonstrated a later stage of intonation development than younger children. These preliminary results support the idea that children acquire some foundations or prerequisites of intonation production through maturation, as measured by chronological age, even without robust auditory experience.Intonation refers to distinctive patterns of vocal melody (Crystal, 1991;Cruttenden, 1997). The melodies of speech are related to virtually all levels of verbal communication, including emotional expression, pragmatics, and syntactic structure. On the acoustic level, melody patterns result from linguistically significant changes in the fundamental frequency (f 0 ) of the voice. The physiological correlate of f 0 is the rate of vibration of the vocal folds. Finally, on the psychological level, "tone" refers to the functional organization of pitch patterns in the phonological system of speakers and listeners.Recent research in infant speech has supported the hypothesis that intonation is an earlydeveloping system. A strong form of the hypothesis, in fact, suggests that children acquire the intonational system before the onset of meaningful speech (e.g., Locke, 1983). Although this strong claim has not been substantiated to-date, the evidence does suggest that children attain significant milestones in the acquisition of intonation during the first year of life. To investigate the typical stages of intonation development in prelinguistic and early meaningful speech, Snow (2006Snow ( , 2007 studied the production of rising and falling pitch patterns in Englishspeaking children with normal hearing (NH) between the ages of 6 and 23 months. The dependent variable was "accent range," that is, how much pitch changed within a tone contour. When infants consistently produced rising or falling utterance-final tones with a width of pitch change that is comparable to that of older children and adults, this was taken as evidence that the infants had acquired those tones.Contact author: David Snow dps@purdue.edu 765-494-3824. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptClin Linguist Phon. Auth...

Recognition and production of emotions in children with cochlear implants

“…In that respect, our results are in line with the authors who found that cochlear implants have favorable effects in processing emotional content (e.g. Bat-Chava et al, 2005;Snow & Ertmer, 2009). At this time, we cannot explain why one CI child, L. K., seemed to be more successful than his two peers in mimicking the model.…”

“…The behavior of younger children in this study, albeit more anecdotal than conclusive, speaks in favor of those who believe that both the chronological and the hearing age should be taken into consideration (e.g. Snow & Ertmer, 2009;Volkova et al, 2012). On one hand, hearing experience is crucial in developing good speech perception and production skills but, clearly, general cognitive development is an important factor as well.…”

“…Most and Aviner (2009) also found age to be an important factor in perception of emotion, as did a number of other authors (e.g. Snow & Ertmer, 2009;Volkova et al, 2012).…”

Point vowel duration in children with hearing aids and cochlear implants at 4 and 5 years of age

“…Since these children were initially delayed but later performed in the average range, their rate of change was accelerated compared to children with NH. In other studies, Snow and Ertmer (2009) looked at the development of intonation in preschool children with CIs, and Ertmer and Inniger (2009) looked at the development of utterance frequency and complexity in two young children with CIs. These studies with children with HAs and CIs suggest that those children with HL may have experienced more rapid acquisition of certain linguistic features than their peers with NH.…”

Speech intelligibility and prosody production in children with cochlear implants

“…Snow and Ertmer (2009) studied the development of intonation in a longitudinal study of 6 children who received a cochlear implant between the ages of 10–36 months. Spontaneous speech samples were collected 2 months prior to implant activation and monthly for 6 months after activation.…”