Abstract
Background and Aims: The current study is a first investigation reporting the speech production characteristics of an early deafened adult cochlear implant user after a course of speech–language treatment.
Methods and Procedures: The participant is culturally deaf and received the cochlear implant when she was 43 years old. A 24‐week ABCABC single‐subject treatment programme was conducted addressing articulation, the oral production of printed words, and voice production, with two 4‐week segments for each area.
Outcomes and Results: Treatment‐specific progress, revealed by untrained stimuli, was made in areas of articulation and oral production of printed words, but not voice production. Formal measures also confirmed the patient's progress.
Conclusions: These results were discussed in relation to how long‐term reduction of general auditory input and under‐use of the speech production mechanisms can be remediated by technological and behavioural treatment.
Notes
1. As described below, the participant reported that her hearing loss was caused by an episode of measles or chicken pox, but was unable to confirm with medical records. The term ‘early deafened’ is used throughout the present paper to approximate this possible acquired aetiology as stated by the participant. Although the term ‘pre‐lingually deafened’ was consistently used in the patient's clinic records and by her surgeon, the more general term ‘early’ was chosen here, which includes hearing impairment that might have started at or earlier than 2 years of age (before language development).
2. The phrase ‘oral production of printed words’ is used to distinguish this ability from reading (comprehension). Here, the process of orally producing printed words is being specifically referred to.
3. A score of 23 on the Grammatic Completion subtest places a normal‐hearing, native English‐speaking individual to be at an age equivalence of 8 years and 3 months. No norms for normal‐hearing adults are provided; however, it is likely that they would score close to ceiling. The author is not aware of this test being used in the ASL population. This test was the most suitable test available at the time of testing and was chosen by the testing clinician (not the author or the primary treating clinician for the study) for gross clinical assessment after the observation of the patient's grammatical errors during conversation.
4. The author is aware of the difficulty associated with using jitter and shimmer values for clinical decision‐making, since different sets of normative data, using different sets of equipment and recording settings, have been published. Therefore, these values are considered as augmentative to the author's subjective impression of the participant's voice. It is worth noting that the recording setting was constant across the treatment period; and that throughout the manuscript the within‐subject nature of the usage of these values is emphasized.
5. The distinctions of long and short vowels and r‐controlled vowels reflect a classification applied by the author of the Phonological Awareness Test (Robertson and Salter Citation1997) following conventions in reading and phonology research (e.g. Ball and Blachman Citation1991).