Faculty of Education, East China Normal University, Shanghai.
Qihui Special Education School, Shanghai, China.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2021 Nov 8;64(11):4485-4494. doi: 10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00669. Epub 2021 Sep 23.
Purpose Depicting the development pattern of vowel perception for children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CIs) would be useful for clinicians and school teachers to monitor children's auditory rehabilitation. The study was to investigate the development of Mandarin Chinese vowel perception for Mandarin Chinese native-speaking children with the ages of 4-6 years. Method Vowel identification of children with NH and CIs were tested. All children with CIs received CIs before the age of 4 years. In a picture identification task with Mandarin Chinese speech stimuli, listeners identified the target consonant-vowel word among two to four contrastive words that differed only in vowels. Each target word represented a concrete object and was spoken by a young female native Mandarin Chinese talker. The target words included 16 monophthongs, 22 diphthongs, and nine triphthongs. Results Children with NH showed significantly better identification of monophthongs and diphthongs than children with CIs at the age of 6 years, whereas the two groups had comparable performance at age of 4 and 5 years. Children with NH significantly outperformed children with CIs for triphthong identification across all three age groups. For children with NH, a rapid development of perception of all three types of vowels occurred between age 4 and 5 years with a rapid development only for monophthong perception between age 5 and 6 years. For children with CIs, a rapid development of both diphthong and triphthong perception occurred between 4 and 5 years old, but not monophthong, with no significant development between 5 and 6 years old for all three types of vowels. Overall, Mandarin-speaking children with NH achieved their ceiling performance in vowel perception before or at the age of 6 years, whereas children with CIs may need more time to reach the typical level of their peers with NH. Conclusions The development of Mandarin vowel perception for Mandarin-native children differed between preschool-age children with NH and CIs, likely due to the deficits of spectral processing for children with CIs. The results would be a supplement to the development of speech recognition in Mandarin-native children with NH and CIs.
描绘正常听力（NH）和人工耳蜗植入（CI）儿童的元音感知发展模式，对于临床医生和学校教师监测儿童听觉康复情况非常有用。本研究旨在调查 4-6 岁的普通话母语儿童的普通话元音感知发展情况。方法：对 NH 和 CI 儿童进行元音识别测试。所有接受 CI 的儿童都在 4 岁之前接受了 CI。在使用普通话语音刺激的图片识别任务中，听众从两个到四个仅在元音上不同的对比词中识别目标辅音-元音词。每个目标词代表一个具体的物体，由一位年轻的普通话母语女性说话者说出。目标词包括 16 个单元音、22 个双元音和 9 个三元音。结果：6 岁时，NH 组儿童对单元音和双元音的识别明显优于 CI 组儿童，而 4 岁和 5 岁时两组儿童的表现相当。NH 组儿童对三元音的识别明显优于 CI 组儿童，在所有三个年龄组中均如此。对于 NH 组儿童，4 岁至 5 岁之间三种类型元音的感知均快速发展，而 5 岁至 6 岁之间仅单元音感知快速发展。对于 CI 组儿童，4 岁至 5 岁之间双元音和三元音的感知均快速发展，但 5 岁至 6 岁之间，所有三种类型的元音均无显著发展。总体而言，NH 组的普通话儿童在 6 岁或之前达到了元音感知的最高水平，而 CI 组的儿童可能需要更多的时间才能达到具有 NH 的同龄人的典型水平。结论：NH 组和 CI 组学龄前儿童的普通话元音感知发展不同，这可能是由于 CI 儿童的频谱处理能力不足所致。该结果将为 NH 组和 CI 组普通话母语儿童的言语识别发展提供补充。
