| Cochlear implantation provides children with severe-to-profound hearing loss with historically unprecedented access to spoken language. As such, many children can, with early diagnosis, proper audiologic management, and appropriate aural habilitation, have the opportunity to acquire language levels commensurate with their age-matched peers with normal hearing thresholds. Essential to both early language development and eventual linguistic competence is the ability to interpret suprasegmental changes in the speech signal. Past studies have produced conflicting findings regarding these abilities in children with cochlear implants. This study investigates the performance of children with hearing loss who use cochlear implants on various tasks of suprasegmental perception, including word pattern, word stress, intonation, and syllable stress. These results are compared with those of age-matched peers with normal hearing. Although an overall statistical difference between groups was found, pairwise comparisons of the two groups for each subtest revealed a statistically significant difference between groups on only the Word Emphasis subtest. Significant differences between groups were not found on the Syllable Number, Intonation, or Syllable Stress subtests. The distribution of the data seems to indicate that the differences observed between groups can be interpreted as attributable to a lesser hearing age of the children in the cochlear implant group in comparison to their peers with normal hearing. In other words, the results indicate that children who use cochlear implants have the capacity to eventually develop these suprasegmental abilities, but may be delayed due to the effects of the hearing loss prior to cochlear implantation. This interpretation is in contrast to the results of several other similar studies, which suggested that children who use cochlear implants could not develop these abilities due to limitations in the current technology. |
