Language‐specific, hearing‐related changes in vowel spaces: A study of English‐ and Spanish‐speaking cochlear implant users

This study investigates the role of hearing in vowel productions of postlingually deafened cochlear implant (CI) users. Based on the hypothesis that competing demands of intelligibility and economy of effort influence vowel production, we predicted that speakers of a language with a more crowded vowel space, such as American English, would show an increase in average vowel spacing (AVS the average inter‐vowel distance in the F1‐F2 plane) with the provision of hearing from a CI; whereas speakers of a language with fewer vowels, such as Spanish, would not. Results of a preliminary on–off study supported the hypothesis: with hearing from a CI, 7 English‐speaking CI users all increased AVS; however, among 7 Spanish speakers, some increased AVS and some reduced it. The current study is exploring these findings further with new groups of CI users and normal‐hearing speakers of English and Spanish and an elaborated paradigm that includes different speaking rates and comparisons between pre‐implant and post‐impla...