Segmental and suprasegmental errors in Spanish learning cochlear implant users: Neurolinguistic interpretation

This study aims at investigating the impact of cochlear implant (CI) use for phonological development. The main participants were a group of 14 deaf children who had received their CIs in the second year of life, and who had been wearing them for 24 months. A group of normally hearing (NH) children aged 24 months old was also evaluated. Data was obtained from a non-word repetition (NWR) task. Various segmental and suprasegmental measures were obtained from the NWR data. The CI children scored significantly below the controls for one feature (i.e. place of articulation) and for segment substitutions. Suprasegmental analyses revealed that the CI children made fewer errors with unfooted syllables and more stress errors than the NH children. Stress errors were correlated with segmental/feature errors in the CI children exclusively. We conclude that CI users struggle to acquire consonants, which may cascade into further prosodic deficits. The results are interpreted in terms of a motor control model of speech production. We suggest that CIs provide sufficient information to learn rudimentary auditory representations for syllables; however, such auditory representations might not be detailed enough to implicitly derive the somatosensory consequences of the individual consonants.