Cantonese tone production performance of mainstream school children with hearing impairment

Abstract

This study investigated the Cantonese tone production ability of children with hearing impairment studying in mainstream schools. The participants were 87 Cantonese-speaking children with mild-to-profound degrees of hearing loss aged 5.92–13.58 in Hong Kong. Most of the children were fitted with hearing aids (n = 65); 17 of them had profound hearing impairment, one who had severe hearing loss had cochlear implantation, and four who had mild hearing loss were without any hearing device. The Hong Kong Cantonese Articulation Test was administered, and the tones produced were rated by two of the authors and a speech-language pathologist. Group effects of tones, hearing loss level, and also an interaction of the two were found to be significant. The children with profound hearing impairment performed significantly worse than most of the other children. Tone 1 was produced most accurately, whereas tone 6 productions were the poorest. No relationship was found between the number of years of mainstreaming and tone production ability. Tone production error pattern revealed that confusion patterns in tone perception coincided with those in production. Tones having a similar fundamental frequency (F0) at the onset also posed difficulty in tone production for children with hearing impairment.

Keywords::

• Cantonese
• tone production
• hearing loss
• mainstreaming

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charity Trust for supporting the research project. We are grateful to all the participating children and schools for their support and co-operation. We would also like to thank Ms Tammy Lau for data collection as well as Ms Emily Lam for data collection and rating of data. Last but not least we would like to thank Dr David Wilmshurst and his team for editing the manuscript.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.