Patterns of recognition of Arabic consonants by non-native children with cochlear implants and normal hearing

Abstract

Objective: This study examined the patterns of recognition of Arabic consonants, via information transmission analysis for phonological features, in a group of Malay children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CI).

Method: A total of 336 and 616 acoustic tokens were collected from six CI and 11 NH Malay children, respectively. The groups were matched for hearing age and duration of exposure to Arabic sounds. All the 28 Arabic consonants in the form of consonant–vowel /a/ were presented randomly twice via a loudspeaker at approximately 65 dB SPL. The participants were asked to repeat verbally the stimulus heard in each presentation.

Results: Within the native Malay perceptual space, the two groups responded differently to the Arabic consonants. The dispersed uncategorized assimilation in the CI group was distinct in the confusion matrix (CM), as compared to the NH children. Consonants /ħ/, /tˁ/, /sˁ/ and /ʁ/ were difficult for the CI children, while the most accurate item was /k/ (84%). The CI group transmitted significantly reduced information, especially for place feature transmission, then the NH group (p < 0.001). Significant interactions between place-hearing status and manner-hearing status were also obtained, suggesting there were information transmission differences in the pattern of consonants recognition between the study groups.

Conclusion: CI and NH Malay children may be using different acoustic cues to recognize Arabic sounds, which contribute to the different assimilation categories’ patterns within the Malay perceptual space.

Keywords:

• Arabic consonants
• Non-native children
• Cochlear implant
• Phonological features
• Information transmission analysis
• Dispersed uncategorized assimilation
• Perceptual space

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank all children who participated in this study and their parents for giving the consent to complete this project work. The help of Ms Hafizah Azraai the speech therapist, for coding the children responses on the record sheet during data collection is gratefully acknowledged. We are grateful to anonymous reviewers of Cochlear Implant Int. for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this manuscript as well as Dr Christopher C. W. Fong for the English editing work.

Disclaimer statements

Contributors None.

Funding This work was partly supported by the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) Research Grant KOMUNITI-2012-010.

Conflict of interest None.

Ethics approval None.

ORCID

Cila Umat http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9619-4756