Acoustic Characteristics of the Speech of Young Cochlear Implant Users: A Comparison with Normal-Hearing Age-Mates

In Brief Objective The primary objective of this study was to compare select acoustic characteristics of the speech of deaf children who use cochlear implants (young cochlear implant users) with those of children with normal hearing. A secondary objective of this study was to examine the effect, if any, of the deaf child’s education (oral versus total communication) on the similarity of these acoustic characteristics to those of normal-hearing age-mates. Design Speech was recorded from 181 young cochlear implant users and from 24 children with normal hearing. All speech was produced by imitation, and consisted of complete sentences. Acoustic measures included voice onset time (/t/, /d/), second formant frequency (/i/, /ɔ/), spectral moments (mean, skew and kurtosis of /s/ and /ʃ/), a nasal manner metric, and durations (of vowels, words, and sentences). Results and Discussion A large percentage (46 to 97%) of the young cochlear implant users produced acoustic characteristics with values within the range found for children with normal hearing. Exceptions were sentence duration and vowel duration in sentence-initial words, for which only 23 and 25%, respectively, of the COCHLEAR IMPLANT users had values within the normal range. Additionally, for most of the acoustic measures, significantly more COCHLEAR IMPLANT users from oral than from total communication settings had values within the normal range. Conclusions Compared with deaf children with hearing aids (from previous studies by others), deaf children who use cochlear implants have improved speech production skills, as reflected in the acoustic measures of this study. Placement in an oral communication educational setting is also associated with more speech production improvement than placement in a total communication setting. This study examined acoustic measurements that reflect articulatory control of specific vowel and consonant features in 181 cochlear implanted and 24 normal-hearing children. The most striking result of comparing measurements from these samples is the relatively large number of children with cochlear implants whose acoustic characteristics reached or closely approached normal values. Acoustic characteristics this close to normal have not previously been observed in the speech of most children with profound deafness who use hearing aids. Achieving this level of articulatory control was attributed to a combination of improved speech perception from cochlear implantation and auditory/oral education, which provided a significant advantage when results from oral students were compared with those of children from total communication settings. Rosalie M. Uchanski and