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Consonant Production and Language Skills in Mandarin-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants
Shu-Chen Peng, MA;
Amy L. Weiss, PhD;
Hintat Cheung, PhD;
Yung-Song Lin, MD
Arch Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg. 2004;130:592-597.
Objectives 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.
Design Descriptive study.
Setting Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan, Taiwan.
Patients 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.
Outcome Measures 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.
From the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology, University of Iowa, Iowa City (Ms Peng and Dr Weiss); the Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University, Taipei (Dr Cheung); and the Department of Otolaryngology, Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan, Taiwan (Dr Lin). The authors have no relevant financial interest in this article.
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