The development of falling intonation in young children with cochlear implants: a 2-year longitudinal study

Abstract

This article describes the development of intonation in 12 cochlear implant (CI) recipients. In a previously reported study of the first year of CI use, children who were implanted late (after 24 months) acquired intonation more rapidly than the younger participants. The older children's advantage is plausibly owing to their greater maturity. However, children who were implanted early (before 25 months) did not have an advantage over the still younger control group of infants with normal hearing (NH), suggesting that the advantage requires a critical age of about 30 months. The younger CI-users reached this age in the second year of CI use. The results confirmed our expectation that even the younger CI recipients would acquire intonation more rapidly than infants with NH who had the same amount of robust hearing experience. Clinical implications are discussed in relation to the question of early versus late implantation.

Keywords:

• prosody
• pragmatics
• hearing disorders
• cochlear implant

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Andrea Einterz and Katie Connell for their contributions to the data analysis portions of this research and we thank the children and families who made this study possible.

This research was funded in part by NIH grant R01DC007863 awarded to the second author.

Declarations of Interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.