ABSTRACT
This study investigates the role of acoustic salience and hearing impairment in learning phonologically minimal pairs. Picture-matching and object-matching tasks were used to investigate the learning of consonant and vowel minimal pairs in five- to six-year-old deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI), and children of the same age with normal hearing (NH). In both tasks, the CI children showed clear difficulties with learning minimal pairs. The NH children also showed some difficulties, however, particularly in the picture-matching task. Vowel minimal pairs were learned more successfully than consonant minimal pairs, particularly in the object-matching task. These results suggest that the ability to encode phonetic detail in novel words is not fully developed at age six and is affected by task demands and acoustic salience. CI children experience persistent difficulties with accurately mapping sound contrasts to novel meanings, but seem to benefit from the relative acoustic salience of vowel sounds.
ABSTRACT
The effect of using signed communication on the spoken language development of deaf children with a cochlear implant (CI) is much debated. We report on two studies that investigated relationships between spoken word and sign processing in children with a CI who are exposed to signs in addition to spoken language. Study 1 assessed rapid word and sign learning in 13 children with a CI and found that performance in both language modalities correlated positively. Study 2 tested the effects of using sign-supported speech on spoken word processing in eight children with a CI, showing that simultaneously perceiving signs and spoken words does not negatively impact their spoken word recognition or learning. Together, these two studies suggest that sign exposure does not necessarily have a negative effect on speech processing in some children with a CI.
