Listeners' perception of lexical stress in the first words of infants with cochlear implants and normally hearing infants

Comprehension of clitic pronouns by children with cochlear implants: the role of sentence stress

OBJECTIVES

This study investigates the role of sentence stress on the comprehension of sentences with clitic pronouns (unstressed morphemes and a typical feature of Romance languages) by children with cochlear implants (CIs).

METHODS

Thirteen children (seven girls) with CIs and 15 children (seven girls) with NH between eight and 12 years who are monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese participated on a computerized sentence comprehension task that involved manipulation of stress placement of possible antecedent words to clitic pronouns.

RESULTS

Children with CIs were significantly less accurate than children with NH in comprehending sentences with clitics, regardless of sentence stress. For children with NH, stress on the correct antecedent significantly increased sentence comprehension accuracy. For children with CI, there was no significant effect of sentence stress on selecting the correct antecedent for clitic pronouns.

DISCUSSION

Comprehension of sentences with clitic pronouns is challenging for children with CIs and this challenge holds cross-linguistically. Furthermore, children with CIs do not use prosodic information to support comprehension of sentences with clitics similarly to NH children.

CONCLUSION

Language-specific syntactic, morphosyntactic, and prosodic contrasts affecting sentence comprehension need to be assessed in children with CIs to plan an effective intervention.

Perception of speech stress in children with hearing impairment

PURPOSE

The study aimed to test effect of training on the perception of speech stress in children with severe to profound hearing impairment. The first objective was to compare the speech stress perception scores of children with hearing impairment and language age-matched children with normal hearing sensitivity after short term prosody training and the second objective was to correlate between the speech stress perception scores and the language age of the children with hearing impairment.

METHOD

Thirty children with normal hearing (CWNH) in the age range of 3-7 years and thirty children with hearing impairment (CWHI) who had a language age of 3-7 years participated in the study. The authors formulated 24 concrete Malayalam sentences and their picture cognate pairs (stressed and unstressed) for each sentence. The stressed and unstressed version for each sentence was audio recorded separately.The study was carried out in two phases; phase 1 included the training on acoustic cues of speech stress followed by testing in phase 2. Both the phases were attended by all the participants.

RESULTS

There was a significant difference between the CWNH and CWHI wherein, children with hearing impairment had lower speech stress perception scores. However, improvements in speech stress perception were observed in children with hearing impairment after the training phase. Also, a positive correlation between the language age and the perception of speech stress scores in CWHI was found indicating that as the language age increased there was an increase in the speech stress perception scores.

CONCLUSION

The pre and post training speech stress perception scores were significantly different, with higher scores on the post-training test, indicating that the short term speech stress training for the children with hearing impairment was beneficial. The positive strong correlation between stress perception scores and language age shows that, prosody perception and language learning facilitate each other. Thereby, the conventional speech-language and auditory training should expand and include prosody training from an early age for children with hearing impairment.