Context effects for vowels produced by children with cochlear implants

This study examined the effect of context on vowel perception and production for children with normal hearing (NH) and hearing impaired children using cochlear implants (CI). Nine English vowels in isolation and /hVt/ syllables were elicited from 3 NH and 3 CI children between the ages of 8-10. Perceptual results showed that vowels in context were identified with greater accuracy for both groups, although there was no difference in overall accuracy of vowel identification between groups. Acoustic analyses also failed to demonstrate a difference between groups or conditions. The results suggest that coarticulation may account for the significantly better perceptual scores for the context condition and support previous research with adults regarding the role of context in vowel perception.