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

描述（由申请人提供）：尽管人工耳蜗植入物为听者提供了传入声音的降级版本，但在生命早期植入人工耳蜗已帮助全球数千名重度听力损失儿童与家人、护理人员、教师和同龄人进行口头互动。从科学的角度来看，这群人非常感兴趣，因为他们的听觉系统和大脑正在随着设备的发展而发展。相对而言，我们对这些条件下大脑的发育知之甚少，尤其是对输入系统的退化输入与语言习得系统的相互作用、大脑神经可塑性在生命早期的作用以及决定声音感知和产生之间关系的因素知之甚少。在这里，我们专注于耳蜗植入儿童的感知和生产的语音音高变化的讲话，传达韵律线索（问题/声明的对比，语音情感）和词义（词汇音调，如中文）。人工耳蜗的一个主要问题是音调信息不能很好地通过设备传输。然而，韵律线索和情感交流对儿童的语言习得和社会性发展至关重要。对于学习声调语言的儿童来说，较慢的音高变化传达韵律/情感信息，而音节内更快的屈折变化传达意义，这表明他们更需要足够的音高感知。在我们之前对成年人的研究中，我们已经证明，耳蜗植入者和正常听力者更重视次要声学线索，例如当主要线索退化时的强度变化。在这里，我们扩展我们的工作，询问这种补偿技能如何在学龄正常听力和耳蜗植入儿童中发展，以及是否也可以在耳蜗植入儿童的言语产生中发现重点的转移。我们假设，植入人工耳蜗的儿童对韵律线索和词汇音调的感知敏感性，以及他们的听觉系统， 通过关注次要线索进行补偿的能力将取决于以下因素：植入时的年龄、极重度听力损失发作时的年龄、残余声听力、辨别和识别动态音调变化的能力、他们的经验长度 设备，以及其他因素，如他们的社会经济地位和非语言智力。我们还假设，人工耳蜗植入儿童在其话语中产生足够音高变化的能力，将受到他们的感知能力和听觉历史的影响。最后，我们假设说普通话的儿童与人工耳蜗植入将能够更好地处理动态语音音高信息比他们的英语同行。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植入儿童的康复治疗产生重要影响。

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.