Projects per year
Abstract
Children with cochlear implants (CIs) learning tonal languages such as Mandarin Chinese face challenges in acquiring tones due to the limitation of devices in coding pitch information. Mandarin has four lexical tones and a neutral tone. A recent study [7] showed that Mandarin-learning preschoolers who were early-implanted (implanted between 1-2 years) were able to produce acoustically target-like tones but with a large amount of variability. This variability might be driven by the small sample size (only seven children were tested in that study) and the differences in length of CI experience. Therefore, the current study tested more early-implanted children and explored the effect of CI experience on their tonal acquisition. Forty-four 3-year-old normal-hearing (NH) controls and 28 early-implanted children (implanted between 1-2 years) with 1-6 years of CI experience were tested. Lexical tone and neutral tone productions were elicited and acoustically compared across groups. The results showed that children with more than 3 years of CI experience had typical tonal productions, acoustically similar to those of NH children, while those with less experience produced less distinguishable tones. These results provide acoustic evidence showing that the combination of both early implantation and longer CI experience facilitates children's acquisition of target-like tones.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody 2020 |
Place of Publication | Baixas, France |
Publisher | International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) |
Pages | 804-808 |
Number of pages | 5 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2020 |
Event | International Conference on Speech Prosody (10th : 2020) - Tokyo, Japan Duration: 25 May 2020 → 28 May 2020 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech Prosody |
---|---|
ISSN (Print) | 2333-2042 |
Conference
Conference | International Conference on Speech Prosody (10th : 2020) |
---|---|
Country/Territory | Japan |
City | Tokyo |
Period | 25/05/20 → 28/05/20 |
Keywords
- language acquisition
- Mandarin Chinese
- lexical tone
- neutral tone
- cochlear implants
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'The production of Mandarin tones by early-implanted children with cochlear implants: effects from the length of implantation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 2 Active
-
Neural and behavioural evidence for children's learning of grammatical morphology
Demuth, K., PhD Contribution (ARC), P. C., PhD Contribution (ARC) 2, P. C. 2., MQRES, M., MQRES (International), M., MQRES 3 (International), M. 3. & Holt, R.
29/06/14 → …
Project: Research
-