Abstract Although children with cochlear implants (CIs) have limited access to pitch information due to the suboptimal device transmission, durational cues are relatively well preserved, allowing for the acquisition of prosodic cues needed for communication. Recent findings show that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs can produce prosodic cues (e.g., duration and pitch) to disambiguate noun-noun compounds (e.g., xiong-mao “panda”) and lists (e.g., xiong, mao “bear, cat”), with those implanted early (before age 2) demonstrating production patterns similar to their typical hearing (TH) peers. This then raises questions about these children’s ability to perceive prosodic cues, and if early implantation again enhances their performance. These questions were investigated using a two-alternative forced-choice task with 57 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs and 66 TH peers. The results show that all preschoolers can perceive the prosodic cues needed to identify compounds but not lists, suggesting that, like English, the mapping between prosodic cues and postlexical meaning is also acquired late in children learning a tonal language. In terms of the effect of CIs, those implanted before age 2 performed as well as their TH peers. These findings suggest that preschoolers may rely more on other linguistic information rather than prosodic cues when comprehending compounds and lists, offering cross-linguistic evidence for this tendency. Furthermore, interventions for preschoolers with CIs should support the mapping of prosodic cues to discourse functions rather than just vocabulary training, improving daily communicative abilities.
Xu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.