Cochlear-Implanted Children's Use of Acoustic Cues in Prosody and Lexical Tones

植入人工耳蜗的儿童对韵律和词汇声调中声音提示的使用

• 批准号: 8875663
• 负责人: Monita Chatterjee
• 金额: $ 31.47万
• 依托单位: FATHER FLANAGAN'S BOYS' HOME
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-07-01 至 2019-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8875663
• 关键词: Acoustics; Adult; Age; Auditory; Auditory system; Brain; Caregivers; Child; Child Language; Chinese People; Cochlear Implants; Cochlear implant procedure; Collaborations; Communication; Complex; Cues; Data; Development; Devices; Emotional; Emotions; Face; Family Caregiver; Frequencies; Health; Hearing; Hearing Aids; Hearing Impaired Persons; Implant; Individual; Infant; Intelligence; Language; Language Development; Learning; Length; Life; Literature; Measures; Mediating; Moods; Music; Neuronal Plasticity; Pattern; Perception; Performance; Pitch Perception; Play; Population; Process; Production; Published Comment; Recording of previous events; Rehabilitation therapy; Relative (related person); Residual state; Role; School-Age Population; Secondary to; Semantics; Social Development; Social Interaction; Socioeconomic Status; Speech; Structure; System; Taiwan; Technology; Testing; Voice; Weight; Work; base; cognitive load; design; experience; hearing impairment; implantation; interest; lexical; peer; preference; research study; simulation; skills; sound; teacher; temporal measurement

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although cochlear implants provide a degraded version of the incoming sound to the listener, cochlear implantation early in life has helped thousands of children with severe hearing loss worldwide to interact verbally with their families, caregivers, teachers, and peers. This population is of great interest from a scientific viewpoint, as their auditory systems and their brains are developing with the device in place. Relatively little is known about the development of the brain under these conditions, particularly about the interaction of the degraded input to the system with the language acquisition system, the role of the neuroplasticity of the brain in the early years of life, and the factors that determine the relationship between the perception and production of sounds. Here, we focus on cochlear-implanted children's perception and production of voice pitch inflections in speech, which convey prosodic cues (question/statement contrasts, voice emotion) and word meaning (lexical tones in languages such as Chinese). A major problem in cochlear implants is that voice pitch information is poorly transmitted through the device. Yet, prosodic cues and emotional communication are critical for children's language acquisition and social development. For children learning a tonal language, the slower pitch changes convey prosodic/emotional information, while the more rapid inflections within syllables convey meaning, suggesting an even greater need for adequate pitch perception. In our previous work with adults, we have shown that listeners with cochlear implants as well as normal hearing place greater emphasis on secondary acoustic cues such as intensity changes when the primary cue is degraded. Here, we extend our work to ask how this compensatory skill develops in school-aged normally-hearing and cochlear-implanted children, and whether the shift in emphasis is also to be found in speech production by children with cochlear implants. We hypothesize that the perceptual sensitivity of children with cochlear implants to prosodic cues and lexical tones, as well as their ability to compensate by attending to secondary cues, will be determined by factors such as their age at implantation, age at onset of profound hearing loss, residual acoustic hearing, their ability to discriminate and identify dynamic pitch changes, the length of their experience with the device, and other factors such as their socio-economic status and nonverbal intelligence. We also hypothesize that the ability of children with cochlear implants to produce adequate pitch changes in their utterances, will be influenced both by their perceptual capabilities and their auditory history. Finally, we hypothesize that Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants will be better able to process dynamic voice pitch information than their English-speaking counterparts. The work, which will involve collaborations with labs in the US and Taiwan, is expected to have important implications for cochlear implant technology as well as rehabilitative therapies for children with cochlear implants.

描述(由申请人提供)：尽管人工耳蜗为听者提供了传入声音的降级版本，但早期人工耳蜗植入帮助全球数千名严重听力损失的儿童与他们的家人、照顾者、老师和同龄人进行口头交流。从科学的角度来看，这一群体非常感兴趣，因为他们的听觉系统和大脑都是在设备到位的情况下发育起来的。对这些情况下大脑的发育情况知之甚少，特别是关于系统退化的输入与语言习得系统的相互作用，大脑早期神经可塑性的作用，以及决定感知和产生声音之间关系的因素。在这里，我们关注植入人工耳蜗的儿童在言语中对音调变化的感知和产生，这些变化传达了韵律线索(问题/陈述对比、声音情感)和词义(汉语等语言中的词汇语调)。人工耳蜗术的一个主要问题是语音音调信息在设备中的传输效果不佳。然而，韵律线索和情感交流对儿童的语言习得和社会发展至关重要。对于学习声调语言的儿童来说，音调变化越慢，传达的是韵律/情感信息，而音节内变化越快，传达的意思就越多，这表明更需要足够的音调感知。在我们之前对成年人的工作中，我们已经表明，植入人工耳蜗和正常听力的听者更强调次要声学线索，例如当主要线索退化时强度变化。在这里，我们的工作扩展到询问这种补偿技能在学龄儿童中是如何发展的，以及这种侧重点的转移是否也可以在植入人工耳蜗的儿童的言语产生中找到。我们假设，植入人工耳蜗术的儿童对韵律线索和词汇音调的知觉敏感性以及他们的 通过注意次要线索进行补偿的能力将由以下因素决定：植入时的年龄、严重听力损失开始时的年龄、残余听力、辨别和识别动态音调变化的能力、他们在 设备，以及其他因素，如社会经济地位和非语言智力。我们还假设，植入人工耳蜗的儿童在他们的话语中产生足够的音调变化的能力，将受到他们的感知能力和他们的听觉历史的影响。最后，我们假设说普通话的儿童植入人工耳蜗会比说英语的儿童更能处理动态的音调信息。这项工作将涉及与美国和台湾的实验室合作，预计将对人工耳蜗植入技术以及人工耳蜗术后儿童的康复治疗产生重要影响。