Vowel spaces in Swedish adolescents with cochlear implants.

This paper examines vowel production in Swedish adolescents with cochlear implants. Twelve adolescents with cochlear implants and 11 adolescents with normal hearing participated. Measurements were made of the first and second formants in all the nine long Swedish vowels. The values in hertz were bark-transformed, and two measures of the size of the vowel space were obtained. The first of them was the average Euclidean distance in the F1-F2 plane between the nine vowels and the mean F1 and F2 values of all the vowels. The second was the mean Euclidean distance in the F1-F2 plane between all the vowels. The results showed a significant difference for both vowel space measures between the two groups of adolescents. The cochlear implant users had a smaller space than the adolescents with normal hearing. In general, the size of the vowel space showed no correlations with measures of receptive and productive linguistic abilities. However, the results of an identification test showed that the listeners made more confusions of the vowels produced by speakers who had a small mean distance in the F1-F2 plane between all the vowels.

[1]  Jean C. Krause,et al.  Acoustic properties of naturally produced clear speech at normal speaking rates. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[2]  R G Daniloff,et al.  Phonetic disintegration in a five-year-old following sudden hearing loss. , 1982, The Journal of speech and hearing disorders.

[3]  F. E. Offeciers,et al.  Outcome of Cochlear Implantation at Different Ages from 0 to 6 Years , 2002, Otology & neurotology : official publication of the American Otological Society, American Neurotology Society [and] European Academy of Otology and Neurotology.

[4]  J Wozniak,et al.  Changes in sound pressure and fundamental frequency contours following changes in hearing status. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[5]  J. Spitzer,et al.  Speaking fundamental frequency, intensity, and rate of adventitiously profoundly hearing-impaired adult women. , 1993, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[6]  Paul Boersma,et al.  Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer , 2002 .

[7]  R. S. Waldstein,et al.  Effects of postlingual deafness on speech production: implications for the role of auditory feedback. , 1990, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[8]  H. Levitt.  Transformed up-down methods in psychoacoustics. , 1971, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  W. Baumgartner,et al.  Effect of the loss of auditory feedback on segmental parameters of vowels of postlingually deafened speakers. , 2003, Auris, nasus, larynx.

[10]  A. Geers,et al.  Acoustic Characteristics of the Speech of Young Cochlear Implant Users: A Comparison with Normal-Hearing Age-Mates , 2003, Ear and hearing.

[11]  D. Horga,et al.  Voice and pronunciation of cochlear implant speakers , 2006, Clinical linguistics & phonetics.

[12]  J. Hillenbrand,et al.  Acoustic characteristics of American English vowels. , 1994, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[13]  M. Smotherman,et al.  Sensory feedback control of mammalian vocalizations , 2007, Behavioural Brain Research.

[14]  T. Nikolopoulos,et al.  Age at Implantation: Its Importance in Pediatric Cochlear Implantation , 1999, The Laryngoscope.

[15]  D. Burnham,et al.  What's New, Pussycat? On Talking to Babies and Animals , 2002, Science.

[16]  Raymond D. Kent,et al.  Acoustic and Intelligibility Characteristics of Sentence Production in Neurogenic Speech Disorders , 2000, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica.

[17]  B Hagerman,et al.  Efficient adaptive methods for measuring speech reception threshold in quiet and in noise. , 1995, Scandinavian audiology.

[18]  Tina Ibertsson,et al.  Speech recognition, working memory and conversation in children with cochlear implants , 2009 .

[19]  David B. Pisoni,et al.  Intelligibility of normal speech I: Global and fine-grained acoustic-phonetic talker characteristics , 1996, Speech Commun..

[20]  H. Lane,et al.  Speech deterioration in postlingually deafened adults. , 1991, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[21]  J Wozniak,et al.  The effect of changes in hearing status on speech sound level and speech breathing: a study conducted with cochlear implant users and NF-2 patients. , 1998, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[22]  R. B. Monsen,et al.  Toward measuring how well hearing-impaired children speak. , 1978, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[23]  P. Kuhl,et al.  Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. , 1997, Science.

[24]  A. Löfqvist,et al.  Is age at implant the only factor that counts? The influence of working memory on lexical and grammatical development in children with cochlear implants , 2004, International journal of audiology.

[25]  C. Smith,et al.  Residual hearing and speech production in deaf children. , 1975, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[26]  H Lane,et al.  Speech of cochlear implant patients: a longitudinal study of vowel production. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[27]  H Lane,et al.  The effects of changes in hearing status in cochlear implant users on the acoustic vowel space and CV coarticulation. , 2001, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[28]  T. Nikolopoulos,et al.  Age at implantation and development of vocal and auditory preverbal skills in implanted deaf children. , 2007, International journal of pediatric otorhinolaryngology.

[29]  P. Kuhl,et al.  Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech , 1987 .

[30]  M. Hildesheimer,et al.  The effect of partially restored hearing on speech production of postlingually deafened adults with multichannel cochlear implants. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[31]  R. B. Monsen.  Normal and reduced phonological space: the production of English vowels by deaf adolescents , 1976 .

[32]  P. Kuhl,et al.  The effect of reduced vowel working space on speech intelligibility in Mandarin-speaking young adults with cerebral palsy. , 2005, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[33]  Vesna Mildner,et al.  Acoustic analysis of the speech of children with cochlear implants: A longitudinal study , 2007, Clinical linguistics & phonetics.

[34]  G. Weismer,et al.  The influence of speaking rate on vowel space and speech intelligibility for individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. , 1995, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[35]  Lucie Ménard,et al.  Interactions of speaking condition and auditory feedback on vowel production in postlingually deaf adults with cochlear implants. , 2007, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[36]  A. Neel,et al.  Vowel space characteristics and vowel identification accuracy. , 2008, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.