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Auditory brainstem implantation (ABI) is a recent innovation in pediatric hearing restoration in children with a sensorineural hearing impairment. Only limited information is available on the spontaneous speech development of severe-to-profound congenitally hearing-impaired children who received an ABI. The purpose of this study was to investigate longitudinally the accuracy of ABI children's word productions in spontaneous speech in comparison to the accuracy of children who received a cochlear implant and children with normal hearing. The data of this study consist of recordings of the spontaneous speech of the first three Dutch-speaking children living in Belgium who received an ABI. The children's utterances were phonemically transcribed and for each word, the distance between the child's production and the standard adult phonemic transcription was computed using the Levenshtein Distance as a metric. The same procedure was applied to the longitudinal data of the children with CI and the normally hearing children. The main result was that the Levenshtein Distance decreased in the three children with ABI but it remained significantly higher than that of children with typical hearing and cochlear implants matched on chronological age, hearing age, and lexicon size. In other words, the phonemic accuracy increased in the children with ABI but stayed well below that of children without hearing loss and children with cochlear implants. Moreover, the analyses revealed considerable individual variation between the children with ABI.

The frequency of occurrence of words and sounds has a pervasive influence on typically developing children's language acquisition. For instance, highly frequent words appear earliest in a child's lexicon, and highly frequent phonemes are produced more accurately. This study evaluates (a) whether word frequency influences word accuracy and (b) whether this is also the case for children with a history of auditory deprivation. More specifically, the influence of word frequency on phonemic accuracy is examined in deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI), and compared to age-matched children with typical hearing, between word onset and age 7. Results show that highly frequent words are produced more accurately, except for words in the highest frequency regions (i.e., predominantly closed-class words). This effect is more pronounced in children with typical hearing when compared with children with CI. Thus, children with CI are sensitive to word frequency, but to a lesser extent than peers with typical hearing.

The impact of input frequency (IF) and functional load (FL) of segments in the ambient language on the acquisition order of word-initial consonants is investigated. Several definitions of IF/FL are compared and implemented. The impact of IF/FL and their components are computed using a longitudinal corpus of interactions between thirty Dutch-speaking children (age range: 0 ; 6-2 ; 0) and their primary caretaker(s). The corpus study reveals significant correlations between IF/FL and acquisition order. The highest predictive values are found for the token frequency of segments, and for FL computed on minimally different word types in child-directed speech. Although IF and FL significantly correlate, they do have a different impact on the order of acquisition of word-initial consonants. When the impact of IF is partialed out, FL still has a significant correlation with acquisition order. The reverse is not true, suggesting that the acquisition of word-initial consonants is mainly influenced by their discriminating function.

Auditory brainstem implantation (ABI) is a recent innovation in pediatric hearing restoration in children with a sensorineural hearing impairment. Only limited information is available on the spontaneous speech development of severe-to-profound congenitally hearing-impaired children who received an ABI. The purpose of this study was to investigate longitudinally the accuracy of ABI children's word productions in spontaneous speech in comparison to the accuracy of children who received a cochlear implant and children with normal hearing. The data of this study consist of recordings of the spontaneous speech of the first three Dutch-speaking children living in Belgium who received an ABI. The children's utterances were phonemically transcribed and for each word, the distance between the child's production and the standard adult phonemic transcription was computed using the Levenshtein Distance as a metric. The same procedure was applied to the longitudinal data of the children with CI and the normally hearing children. The main result was that the Levenshtein Distance decreased in the three children with ABI but it remained significantly higher than that of children with typical hearing and cochlear implants matched on chronological age, hearing age, and lexicon size. In other words, the phonemic accuracy increased in the children with ABI but stayed well below that of children without hearing loss and children with cochlear implants. Moreover, the analyses revealed considerable individual variation between the children with ABI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]