Research On The Speech Prosodic Characteristics And Intervention Strategies Of Hearing-impaired Children

Abnormal rhythm of hearing-impaired children have a great impact on speech intelligibility, fluency and expression to convey his ideas, it could adversely affect the communication with others. So prosodic problem of hearing-impaired children is urgent. But there are rarely studies on speech prosody of hearing-impaired children, and there is little training for speech prosody in clinical practice.Therefore, this study is divided into two parts. The first part is a departure from the two features of speech prosody-intonation and rhythm to do a comparative study among cochlear implant (CI) children, children with hearing aid (HA) and normal hearing (NH) children. The study designed by acoustic analysis method to obtain the intonation and rhythm characteristics of three types of children, and find parameters’commonalities or differences among CI children, HA children and NH children.First, the study based on the emotional function of intonation, through the way of acoustic analysis, compare17CI children,15HA children and18NH children’s intonation parameters differences as well as changes in happy, neutral and sad emotional tone.We find the intonation characteristics as follows:(1) NH children’s average fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency standard deviation, and range of fundamental frequency varies with the change of emotional tone, they significantly increase in happy emotional tone,yet prominently reduce in sadness;(2) The average fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency standard deviation and fundamental frequency range of CI children dramatically increase in happy emotional tone, but they don’t degrade and reduce in sadness, there have no difference between sad and neutral;(3) HA children’s average fundamental frequency, fundamental frequency standard deviation and range of fundamental frequency reduce obvious when said in sad emotional tone, but increase marginally in happy emotional tone. In addition, there are specific differences that exist among the three types of children:(1) there is a significant difference of the average fundamental frequency between CI children and NH children in sadness, and also a significant difference of that between HA children and NH children in happyness;(2) the average intensity of CI children under three emotional tone are all obviously smaller than NH children, yet the intensity standard deviation were substantially greater than NH children.Second, using the self-made materials with different pace and sentence length, through the method of acoustic analysis, a comparative study of the three types of children is conducted, to obtain differences and changes of parameters related to rhythm for the materials with different rhythms, find the following rhythm characteristics:(1)The pause times, pause duration and speech tempo of CI children and HA children basically increase and slow down in accordance with the order of the imitated speaking speed from fast to slow and the number of words from less to more;(2) The variation trend of NH children’s pause times and duration are consistent with CI children and HA children, but the speech tempo of NH chidren only follow the imitated speaking speed from fast to slow, regardless of the number of words.(3) The pause times, pause duration and speech tempo of CI children in different rhythms sentences are most, longest and slowest, followed by HA children. Specific differences that exist between the three types of children are as follows:(1) When test7and9words, there are significant even extremely significant differences of the pause times, pause duration and speech tempo between CI children and NH children, whether when the test material is9words, there was a obvious difference of speech tempo between HA children and NH children;(2) When test use the medium speed, both speech tempo of CI children and NH children have marked different from NH children, moreover there is a extremely notable difference of the speech tempo between CI children and NH children when using fast speed.The second part of study select18CI children which have abnormal prosodic problem from the first part of the study as research subjects. According to CI children’s speech prosodic characteristics we pertinently integrate with training methods, and develop an appropriate intervention strategy, then study its performance measured by pre-and post-intervention comparison.The results prove that the intervention programs we developed are effective for improving CI children’s speech prosdy, providing a reference for clinical practice on the hearing-impaired children speech prosdy intervention.