Consonant production and language skills in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants.
OBJECTIVE
To investigate the phonemic inventories of syllable-initial consonants in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants, assessing the relationship between the children's mastery levels of consonant production and their receptive and expressive language skills.


METHODS
Descriptive study.


METHODS
Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan, Taiwan.


METHODS
The 30 prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants who participated in the study ranged in age from 6 years to 12 years 6 months, and their age at implantation ranged from 2 years 3 months to 10 years 3 months. The average length of device experience was 3 years 7 months (range, 1 year 7 months to 6 years 5 months). None of the children was identified with concomitant learning disabilities.


METHODS
The 21 Mandarin syllable-initial consonants were elicited using a set of 105 pictures. Two language assessment tools were used to evaluate the children's receptive vocabulary skills as well as their overall receptive and expressive language development.


RESULTS
The mean +/- SD score for correct consonant production was 57.9% +/- 19.5%. Regarding the manner of articulation, plosives received the highest average correct percentage whereas nasals, affricates, fricatives, and the lateral approximant /l/ were less frequently correct. The children's overall percentage of correct scores for consonant production and receptive vocabulary measure were significantly correlated (r = 0.51; P =.005). Additionally, correlation coefficients were significant between the overall score for correct consonant production and both the scores for receptive language measure (r = 0.65; P<.001) and expressive language measure (r = 0.76; P<.001). The participants' consonant production skills were negatively correlated with age at implantation (r = - 0.46; P =.01) and positively correlated with length of experience with cochlear implant (r = 0.45; P =.02).


CONCLUSIONS
Mastery levels of Mandarin syllable-initial consonants remained moderately low in prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants. The present results suggest a significant association between consonant production skills and language development in these children.
Peng
Shu-Chen
SC
Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, University of Iowa, Iowa City 52242-1012, USA. shu-chen-peng@uiowa.edu
Weiss
Amy L
AL
Cheung
Hintat
H
Lin
Yung-Song
YS
D044466:Asian People; D002648:Child; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D012048:Correction of Hearing Impairment; D003638:Deafness / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000534:rehabilitation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D019986:Persons with Hearing Disabilities / Q000523:psychology*; D010700:Phonetics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013624:Taiwan; D014825:Vocabulary