A Study On Word Stress Processing In Children With Chinese Cochlear Implants

The aim of this study is to make a comprehensive investigation of lexical stress processing ability in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants(CIs),which includs lexical stress perception,lexical stress output and the impact of different lexical stress patterns,and to clarify the characteristics of lexical stress processing in Mandarin-speaking children with CIs.On the basis of the overall revelation of lexical stress processing level in children with CIs,this paper also starts with the perception and utilization of different sound cues to analyzes the causes of abnormal or normal lexical stress processing in detail.Fifteen Mandarin-speaking children with CIs and fifteen typical development children(ages 4-6)participated in this study,which were matched by chronological age,non-verbal IQ and gender.This study contains three experiments.In Experiment 1,we invistaged the lexical stress perception in children with CIs and then explored the causes of the abnormal or normal perception of lexical stress.In Experiment 2,we examined their ability to use different sound cues to produce lexical stress.In Experiment 3,we probed into the processing of different lexical stress patterns of children with CIs,specifically whether the trochaic will improve their performance of word learning,and invistaged their output capacity in different lexical stress patterns.The results and main conclusions of these experiments are as follows:First,in terms of lexical stress perception.The correct rate of lexical stress perception in children with CIs is significantly lower than that of typical development children,there is the problem of lexical stress perception.Their ability to perceive the sound cues of the fundamental frequency and duration is also significantly worse than that of the typical development children.Besides the duration is also the main reliance clue on lexical stress perception of typical development children,so it is likely to be that the limitation of the perceivion and utilization of the duration cues,affecting the lexical stress perception ability of children with CIs,resulting in their accuracy of the lexical stress perception is poor.In addition,this study also found that when the duration and fundamental frequenc cues were not available,children with CIs will adopted a compensation strategy that relied on the amplitude of sound cues to perceive lexical stress.Second,in terms of lexical stress output.The ability of using different sound cues to make the differences between stressed syllable and unstressed syllable of children with CIs is significantly worse than that of typical development children,while the limitations on the use of duration and fundamental frequency cues affect their ability to produce lexical stress.Finally,in terms of processing different lexical stress patterns.Different lexical stress patterns will not affect the word learning performance of children with CIs,their new word learning performance is significantly worse than the typical development children,the trochaic does not promote the word learning performance of children with CIs.However,different lexical stress patterns can affect the output of children with CIs.The ability of children with CIs to produce different lexical stress patterns is significantly worse than that of typical development children,and they are more likely to produce iambic,who have difficulty in output of trochaic.The results of acoustic analysis based on different stress patterns show that the poor ability of using and controlling the duration and fundamental frequency cues in trochaic is the cause of the difficulty in the output of children with CIs.