Objective: Normal-hearing (NH) acuity and auditory feedback control are crucial for human voice production and articulation. The lack of auditory feedback in individuals with profound hearing impairment changes their vowel production. The purpose of this study was to compare Persian vowel production in deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) and that in NH children.
Methods: The participants were 20 children (12 girls and 8 boys) with age range of 5 years; 1 month to 9 years. All patients had congenital hearing loss and received a multichannel CI at an average age of 3 years. They had at least 6 months experience of their current device (CI). The control group consisted of 20 NH children (12 girls and 8 boys) with age range of 5 to 9 years old. The two groups were matched by age. Participants were native Persian speakers who were asked to produce the vowels /i/, /e/, /ӕ/, /u/, /o/, and /a/. The averages for first formant frequency (F1) and second formant frequency (F2) of six vowels were measured using Praat software (Version 5.1.44, Boersma & Weenink, 2012). The independent samples t test was conducted to assess the differences in F1 and F2 values and the area of the vowel space between the two groups.
Results: Mean values of F1 were increased in CI children; the mean values of F1 for vowel /i/ and /a/, F2 for vowel /a/ and /o/ were significantly different (P < 0.05). The changes in F1 and F2 showed a centralized vowel space for CI children.
Conclusions: F1 is increased in CI children, probably because CI children tend to overarticulate. We hypothesis this is due to a lack of auditory feedback; there is an attempt by hearing-impaired children to compensate via proprioceptive feedback during articulatory process.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2015.04.012 | DOI Listing |
Bioengineering (Basel)
December 2024
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA.
Room reverberation can affect oral/aural communication and is especially critical in computer analysis of voice. High levels of reverberation can distort voice recordings, impacting the accuracy of quantifying voice production quality and vocal health evaluations. This study quantifies the impact of additive simulated reverberation on otherwise clean voice recordings as reflected in voice metrics commonly used for voice quality evaluation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildren (Basel)
November 2024
Faculty of Medical Sciences, State University of Campinas, Campinas 13083-887, SP, Brazil.
Unlabelled: COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. During and after COVID-19, audiovestibular symptoms and impairments have been reported.
Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on the peripheral and central auditory systems of children and adolescents following the acute COVID-19 phase based on behavioral, electroacoustic, and electrophysiological audiological assessments.
J Commun Disord
December 2024
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, Human Sciences and Services 127, 239 Water Street, Eau Claire, Wisconsin 54703, United States. Electronic address:
Purpose: The aim of the current study is to examine if the relationship among three semivowel sounds (/l, ɹ, w/) and between the semivowel and the following vowel differs by children's overall speech proficiency, and if this relationship affects listeners' perceptual judgment of the liquid sounds (/l, ɹ/). The acoustic proximity among the three semivowel sounds and the acoustic characteristics of the following vowel sounds were examined by each child speaker's overall speech sound proficiency and their semivowel accuracy.
Methods: A total of 21 monolingual English-speaking children with and without speech sound disorders produced monosyllabic words that include target semivowel sounds in word-initial position in different vowel contexts.
Humans rarely speak without producing co-speech gestures of the hands, head, and other parts of the body. Co-speech gestures are also highly restricted in how they are timed with speech, typically synchronizing with prosodically-prominent syllables. What functional principles underlie this relationship? Here, we examine how the production of co-speech manual gestures influences spatiotemporal patterns of the oral articulators during speech production.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInfant Behav Dev
December 2024
Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo, Norway; Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo, Norway.
Previous research suggests that acoustic features of infant-directed speech (IDS) might be beneficial for infants' language development. However, consonants have gained less attention than prosodic and vowel-based features. In the current study, we examined voice onset time (VOT) - a distinguishing cue for stop consonant contrasts - in IDS and adult-directed speech (ADS), and its relation to infants' speech production.
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