The Acoustics of Word-Initial Fricatives and Their Effect on Word-Level Intelligibility in Children With Bilateral Cochlear Implants.
Patrick F Reidy, Kayla Kristensen, Matthew B Winn and 2 others
PMID 27556521WHAT IT FOUND
Children with cochlear implants produced /s/ and /ʃ/ with less acoustic contrast than hearing peers.
In noise, their /s/ words were harder to understand than their /ʃ/ words, but there was no significant difference between the two groups for either sound alone.
Key findings
01Children with cochlear implants produced a smaller acoustic contrast between /s/ and /ʃ/ compared to children with normal hearing, primarily because their /s/ productions had a lower peak frequency.
02When listening to words in background noise, children with cochlear implants were significantly less intelligible on /s/-initial words than on their own /ʃ/-initial words.
03There was no statistically significant difference in intelligibility between children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing for either /s/-initial or /ʃ/-initial words individually.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only children aged 4 to 7, so results may not generalize to older children or adults whose speech has further matured. Participants had an average of just under 4 years of cochlear implant experience, a relatively short duration given that speech production can continue to improve for up to 8 years. Only phonemically correct productions were analyzed in Experiment 2, which may have masked group differences that would appear if inaccurate productions were included. The use of an audio prompt to elicit speech may have encouraged a more careful, less natural speech register than would be used in conversation.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that children with cochlear implants have poorer intelligibility than hearing peers. The study found no significant difference between the groups for either sound; the deficit was internal to the cochlear implant group, where /s/ was harder to understand than /ʃ/.