Production of word-initial fricatives of Mandarin Chinese in prelingually deafened children with cochlear implants

Abstract

Purpose: This study examined the production of fricatives by prelingually deafened Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs).

Method: Fourteen cochlear implant (CI) children (2.9–8.3 years old) and 60 age-matched normal-hearing (NH) children were recorded producing a list of 13 Mandarin words with four fricatives, /f, s, ɕ, ʂ/, occurring at the syllable-initial position evoked with a picture-naming task. Two phonetically-trained native Mandarin speakers transcribed the fricative productions. Acoustic analysis was conducted to examine acoustic measures including duration, normalised amplitude, spectral peak location and four spectral moments.

Result: The CI children showed much lower accuracy rates and more diverse error patterns on all four fricatives than their NH peers. Among these four fricatives, both CI and NH children showed the highest rate of mispronunciation of /s/. The acoustic results showed that the speech of the CI children differed from the NH children in spectral peak location, normalised amplitude, spectral mean and spectral skewness. In addition, the fricatives produced by the CI children showed less distinctive patterns of acoustic measures relative to the NH children.

Conclusion: In general, these results indicate that the CI children have not established distinct categories for the Mandarin fricatives in terms of the place of articulation.

Keywords:

• Cochlear implants
• children
• Mandarin Chinese
• fricatives
• production
• transcription
• acoustics

Acknowledgements

Xiuwu Chen and Xiaoyang Zhao provided assistance in data collection in Beijing, China. Tiffany McDonald, Yitao Mao and Alexa Patton provided technical support in data analysis and in preparation of 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.