Megan Harris, Samantha Borden, Camryn Ryan, and Natalie Gustafson, “Vowel Production of Mandarin-Speaking Children with Cochlear Implants”
Mentor: Jing Yang, Communication Sciences & Disorders
Spoken language is acquired through the use of language and the auditory awareness of one’s own speech. This process of learning is hindered by hearing impairments. The cochlear implant (CI) is an auditory prosthesis that provides electrical hearing to listeners with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss that is caused by damage to the inner ear or acoustic nerve. CI devices greatly improve the speech and language development in prelingually deafened children. Compared to normal hearing (NH) peers, the speech intelligibility of children with CIs is still lower than NH children. The purpose of our research is to examine the production of single vowel sounds by Mandarin-speaking children with CIs. Two groups of children (20 NH and 25 CI) aged between 4.5 and 10 were recruited. The speech materials included a list of Mandarin disyllabic or trisyllabic words. A visual-auditory repetition task was used to elicit speech samples. Each child was asked to repeat the target word presented as an image on a computer screen, followed by an audio prompt produced by a Mandarin-speaking adult. A time-frequency analysis program, TF32, was used to track formants of the target vowel located in the first syllable of each word. Formants represent the vocal tract resonance. The vowels’ acoustic features including the formant frequency values of the first two formants were used to plot the vowel dispersion and to calculate vowel space area. The results revealed that the children with CIs demonstrated deviations from the NH controls in spectral features of the tested single vowels. In addition, the children with CIs produced significantly smaller vowel space area than the NH controls. These findings will help researchers and clinicians better understand the deficits and difficulty of speech production in children with CIs and design a more targeted plan for oral rehabilitation.
My name is Natalie Gustafson and I am a Junior here at UWM in the Communication Sciences & Disorders program. I joined this research team at the beginning of this school year. I am so thankful for the knowledge and skills I have gained through this experience!
Hello!
My name is Samantha Borden and I’m a Senior in the Communication Sciences & Disorders program here at UW-Milwaukee. I have been working in the Speech Acoustics and Development Lab since the fall of 2018. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments!
Welcome!
I’m Megan Harris and am also a senior in the the Communication Sciences and Disorders program. I began working in the lab in the Fall of 2018 as well. Thank you for watching our presentation and we look forward answering any questions or comments!
Thank you for sharing your research with us! Very valuable research!
I have a question. What do you mean by “rescaled normalized F1 and F2” in your results? Can you elaborate this a little bit?
Hello Hanyong,
To better answer your question, where are you refencing your question from? A time stamp would be most helpful!
Thank you
I was asking about the figures in Results (2:45).
Welcome everyone! My name is Camryn Ryan and I’m a senior in the Communication Sciences and Disorders program. I have been working in the lab since fall of 2019. We are happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you for joining us virtually!
Thanks for this presentation. It is interesting to see how vowel production is influenced by the CI. From the vowel space figure, I got the impression that the variance in production was not equally dispersed for the CI users, but that /i/ was closer in production to hearing participants compared to /u/ and /a/. Were there significant differences by vowel? And if, what could have caused that?
Really interesting work!
Hi Dr. Heuer,
In Mandarin, the vowel /a/ is the only low monophthong. So there vowel can be produced with some varitiey without impacting it’s intelligibility too much. This applies to the vowel /u/ as well. As you can see on the chart for Normal Hearing children, there are many vowels in the high front position, therefore /i/ would need to be more consistent in production to be intelligible.
We did not compare formant values for each individual vowel, our calculation focused solely on vowel spacing.
Very interesting. As someone rather unfamiliar with this topic, I have a question. Does this research translate to all children using CIs regardless of language, or would more studies need to be conducted with children who speak difference languages to confirm? Thank you for sharing.
Great Job everyone!
Dr. Lund