Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France.
Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, GIPSA-lab, Grenoble, France; Institut Universitaire de France, France.
J Commun Disord. 2020 Jul-Aug;86:105996. doi: 10.1016/j.jcomdis.2020.105996. Epub 2020 Apr 27.
In the course of productive phonological development, fricatives are among the last speech sounds to emerge and to be mastered by children, probably because of the high degree of articulatory precision they require or because of difficulties with their perception. Children with cochlear implants (CI) face additional difficulties with fricative perception, since high spectral frequency components are shown to be especially difficult to perceive with a cochlear implant. Studying fricative production in children with CIs allows to study how the partial transmission of speech sounds by cochlear implants influences children's speech production, and therefore to explore how perceptual abilities influence the late stages of phonological development. This acoustic study focuses on fricative production at three places of articulation (i.e., /f/, /s/ and /ʃ/), comparing productions by two groups of children (20 children with normal hearing (NH) vs. 13 children with CIs, all aged 5;7 to 10;7 years), and taking into account their consistency in coarticulation and the stability of their production across two different tasks (word-repetition and picture-naming). Statistical analyses were carried out by means of linear mixed-effect models. The results show that while both groups produce /ʃ/ with similar acoustic characteristics, between-group differences are found for /f/ and /s/. Furthermore, effects of consonant-vowel coarticulation are found for children with NH, and are absent for children with CIs. Effects of chronological age are only found for children with CIs (production in older children with CIs nearing that of children with NH). Our study shows that the development of fricative production of five- to 11-year-old children with CIs is affected by the children's hearing abilities and late access to auditory information. These limitations however do not prevent the children from eventually reaching a consistency similar to that of children with NH, as suggested by the fact that their production is still evolving during that age span. The results also show that the acquisition of coarticulation strategies can be impeded by degraded or delayed access to audio.
在生产性语音发展过程中，摩擦音是儿童最后出现并掌握的语音之一，这可能是因为它们需要高度的发音精确性，或者因为它们的感知存在困难。植入人工耳蜗的儿童在摩擦音感知方面面临额外的困难，因为人工耳蜗植入物显示出特别难以感知高光谱频率成分。研究人工耳蜗植入儿童的摩擦音产生，可以研究人工耳蜗对语音声音的部分传输如何影响儿童的语音产生，从而探索感知能力如何影响语音发展的后期阶段。这项声学研究集中在三个发音部位的摩擦音产生上（即/f/、/s/和/ʃ/），比较了两组儿童（20 名正常听力儿童（NH）与 13 名人工耳蜗植入儿童（CI），年龄均为 5 岁 7 个月至 10 岁 7 个月）的产生，同时考虑了它们在协同发音方面的一致性以及在两个不同任务（单词重复和图片命名）中的产生的稳定性。统计分析采用线性混合效应模型进行。结果表明，虽然两组儿童产生/ʃ/的声学特征相似，但在/f/和/s/方面存在组间差异。此外，NH 儿童存在辅音-元音协同发音的影响，而 CI 儿童则不存在。只有 CI 儿童存在年龄的影响（年龄较大的 CI 儿童的产生接近 NH 儿童）。我们的研究表明，5 至 11 岁 CI 儿童的摩擦音产生发展受到儿童听力能力和后期听觉信息获取的影响。然而，这些限制并不能阻止儿童最终达到与 NH 儿童相似的一致性，这表明他们的产生仍在那个年龄范围内发展。结果还表明，协同发音策略的获取可能会因音频受损或延迟而受到阻碍。
