Exploring consequences of short- and long-term deafness on speech production: A lip-tube perturbation study

Abstract

Studies have reported strong links between speech production and perception. We aimed to evaluate the role of long- and short-term auditory feedback alteration on speech production. Eleven adults with normal hearing (controls) and 17 cochlear implant (CI) users (7 pre-lingually deaf and 10 post-lingually deaf adults) were recruited. Short-term auditory feedback deprivation was induced by turning off the CI or by providing masking noise. Acoustic and articulatory measures were obtained during the production of /u/, with and without a tube inserted between the lips (perturbation), and with and without auditory feedback. F1 values were significantly different between the implant OFF and ON conditions for the pre-lingually deaf participants. In the absence of auditory feedback, the pre-lingually deaf participants moved the tongue more forward. Thus, a lack of normal auditory experience of speech may affect the internal representation of a vowel.

• Acoustic analysis
• cochlear implants
• language acquisition
• speech production measurement
• ultrasound

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the participants, Dominique Côté for her help in data processing, and Marlene Busko for copy-editing the paper.

Declaration of interest

The authors report having no conflict of interest. This research was supported by grants from the government of Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Notes

¹It is possible that the pronunciation of a specific vowel by a deaf participant may have been accurately produced, but his/her voice quality may have been inferior (high pitch, nasalised), which may have influenced the perception of the listener. In our opinion, this would not invalidate the perceptual assessment, in this paradigm.