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

描述（由申请人提供）：虽然人工耳蜗为听者提供的是一种降级的输入声音，但在生命早期植入人工耳蜗已经帮助世界上成千上万的严重听力损失儿童与他们的家人、照顾者、老师和同龄人进行口头交流。从科学的角度来看，这一人群非常有趣，因为他们的听觉系统和大脑正在随着设备的到位而发展。在这些条件下，人们对大脑的发育知之甚少，特别是对语言习得系统的退化输入的相互作用，大脑在生命早期的神经可塑性的作用，以及决定声音感知和产生之间关系的因素。在这里，我们关注人工耳蜗植入儿童对语音音调变化的感知和产生，音调变化传达韵律线索（问题/陈述句对比、语音情绪）和单词含义（汉语等语言的词汇语调）。人工耳蜗的一个主要问题是声音音高信息很难通过设备传输。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了韵律/情感信息，而更快速的音节变化传达了意义，这表明更需要足够的音高感知。在我们之前对成年人的研究中，我们已经表明，植入人工耳蜗的听者和听力正常的听者一样，更重视次要声音线索，比如当主要声音线索退化时的强度变化。在这里，我们扩展了我们的工作，以询问这种补偿技能是如何在学龄正常听力和植入人工耳蜗的儿童中发展的，以及是否在植入人工耳蜗的儿童的语言产生中也发现了这种重点的转变。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，以及他们的语言

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.