Caitlin M. Dillon

Imitation of Nonwords by Hearing-Impaired Children with Cochlear Implants: Segmental Analyses

In this study, we examined two prosodic characteristics of speech production in 8-10-year-old experienced cochlear implant (CI) users who completed a nonword repetition task. We looked at how often they correctly reproduced syllable number and primary stress location in their responses. Although only 5% of all nonword imitations were produced correctly without errors, 64% of the imitations contained the correct syllable number and 61% had the correct placement of primary stress. Moreover, these target prosodic properties were correctly preserved significantly more often for targets with fewer syllables and targets with primary stress on the initial syllable. Syllable and stress scores were significantly correlated with measures of speech perception, intelligibility, perceived accuracy, and working memory. These findings suggest that paediatric CI users encode the overall prosodic envelope of nonword patterns, despite the loss of more detailed segmental properties. This phonological knowledge is also reflected in other language and memory skills.

Phonological Awareness, Reading Skills, and Vocabulary Knowledge in Children Who Use Cochlear Implants.

In hearing children, reading skills have been found to be closely related to phonological awareness. We used several standardized tests to investigate the reading and phonological awareness skills of 27 deaf school-age children who were experienced cochlear implant users. Approximately two-thirds of the children performed at or above the level of their hearing peers on the phonological awareness and reading tasks. Reading scores were found to be strongly correlated with measures of phonological awareness. These correlations remained the same when we statistically controlled for potentially confounding demographic variables such as age at testing and speech perception skills. However, these correlations decreased even after we statistically controlled for vocabulary size. This finding suggests that lexicon size is a mediating factor in the relationship between the childrens phonological awareness and reading skills, a finding that has also been reported for typically developing hearing children.

Imitation of nonwords by deaf children after cochlear implantation: Preliminary findings

Fourteen prelingually deafened pediatric users of the Nucleus-22 cochlear implant were asked to imitate auditorily presented nonwords. The childrens utterances were recorded, digitized, and broadly transcribed. The target patterns and the childrens imitations were then played back to normal-hearing adult listeners in order to obtain perceptual judgments of repetition accuracy. The results revealed wide variability in the childrens ability to repeat the novel sound sequences. Individual differences in the component processes of encoding, memory, and speech production were strongly reflected in the nonword repetition scores. Duration of deafness before implantation also appeared to be a factor associated with imitation performance. Linguistic analyses of the initial consonants in the nonwords revealed that coronal stops were imitated best, followed by the coronal fricative /s/, and then the labial and velar stops. Labial fricatives were poorly imitated. The theoretical significance of the nonword repetition task as it has been used in past studies of working memory and vocabulary development in normal-hearing children is discussed.

Visual-Motor Integration Skills of Prelingually Deaf Children: Implications for Pediatric Cochlear Implantation

Objective: To investigate visual‐motor integration (VI) skills of prelingually deaf (PLD) children before and after cochlear implantation (CI) and investigate correlations with spoken‐language and related processing measures.