Rehabilitation of vowels in children after cochlear implantation

Dubovski, Marina. (2019). Rehabilitation of vowels in children after cochlear implantation. Diploma Thesis. Filozofski fakultet u Zagrebu, Department of Phonetics. [mentor Mildner, Vesna].

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Abstract

Hearing and listening are integral parts of human development and fuctioning from the very beginning. They are crucial in speech and language acquisition. Hearing impairments can prevent typical speech development and it is therefore crucial that they be diagnosed early so that rehabilitation can start as soon as possible, because early years are important for the development of speech and language, cognitive abilities in general and social skills. Cochlear implants are modern hearing aids that increasingly replace conventional ones and have been shown to yield much better results. The aim of this study was to investigate how well children with cochlear implants acquire speech, particularly vowels, in the course of their rehabilitation. Another question was how is their speech perceived by listeners, trained phoneticians, on the one hand, and lay listeners. Two sets of pictures were compiled for this purpose, one for two children over the age 5, and one for 7 younger children aged between 3 and 5 years. After they had been recorded naming the presented pictures, two groups of listeners (trained phoneticians – university students of phonetics and university students of other programs) were asked to listen to the recordings and answer several questions about the children and their speech. Based on listeners’ responses and acoustic analyses it can be concluded that rehabilitation outcomes are satisfactory, particularly with respect to vowels. It was also found that trained phoneticians are more attentive to details in children’s speech and overall verbal behavior but that untrained listeners are also capable of dealing with children’s auditory and articulatory abilities.

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