Production of word-initial fricatives of Mandarin Chinese in prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants |
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| Authors: | Jing Yang Jessica Vadlamudi Zhigang Yin Chao-Yang Lee Li Xu |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Communication Sciences and Disorders, Speech Language and Hearing Center, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, USA,;2. Communication Sciences and Disorders, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA, and;3. Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, PR China |
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| Abstract: | Purpose: This study examined the production of fricatives by prelingually deafened Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs).Method: Fourteen cochlear implant (CI) children (2.9–8.3 years old) and 60 age-matched normal-hearing (NH) children were recorded producing a list of 13 Mandarin words with four fricatives, /f, s, ?, ?/, occurring at the syllable-initial position evoked with a picture-naming task. Two phonetically-trained native Mandarin speakers transcribed the fricative productions. Acoustic analysis was conducted to examine acoustic measures including duration, normalised amplitude, spectral peak location and four spectral moments.Result: The CI children showed much lower accuracy rates and more diverse error patterns on all four fricatives than their NH peers. Among these four fricatives, both CI and NH children showed the highest rate of mispronunciation of /s/. The acoustic results showed that the speech of the CI children differed from the NH children in spectral peak location, normalised amplitude, spectral mean and spectral skewness. In addition, the fricatives produced by the CI children showed less distinctive patterns of acoustic measures relative to the NH children.Conclusion: In general, these results indicate that the CI children have not established distinct categories for the Mandarin fricatives in terms of the place of articulation. |
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