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.
Cite as: Shen, Y., Wufuer, Z., Ren, Y., Tang, P., Rattanasone, N.X., Yuen, I., Demuth, K. (2020) The production of Mandarin tones by early-implanted children with cochlear implants: effects from the length of implantation. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 804-808, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-164
@inproceedings{shen20_speechprosody,
author={Yanan Shen and Zulayati Wufuer and Yujun Ren and Ping Tang and Nan Xu Rattanasone and Ivan Yuen and Katherine Demuth},
title={{The production of Mandarin tones by early-implanted children with cochlear implants: effects from the length of implantation}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={804--808},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-164}
}