DURATION AND AMPLITUDE OF TONE PRODUCTION IN CHILDREN WITH COCHLEAR IMPLANTS

The purpose of the present study was two-fold:(1)to examine whether Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants(CIs)show distinctive durational and amplitude features for the four lexical tones in their tone production;(2)to compare the durational and amplitude patterns of Mandarin lexical tones in monosyllables produced in citation form by children with CIs with those by age-matched normal-hearing(NH)children.The participants included 14 prelingually deafened Mandarin-speaking children with CIs and 14 NH children,all aged between 2.9 and 8.3 years old.Each participant produced five CV syllables(fa/fa/,fu/fu/,pi/phi/,xu/y/,ke/kh/)in four tones through a tone drill activity.The vowel duration and root-mean-squared amplitude values at nine equidistant time locations over the vowel duration were obtained.The results revealed that the children with CIs produced distinctive durational and amplitude features for the four lexical tones.Their durational pattern and amplitude contours were highly similar to the NH children on tones 1,2 and 4 but differed from the NH children on tone 3.These findings suggested that the children with CIs may utilize the secondary features of tone duration and amplitude to realize tonal differences.