Phonological skills in children with cochlear implants: Contribution of a Cued Speech education
Résumé
Cued Speech (CS) is a phonetic system, which can be used to support oral communication with deaf children: it supplements the auditory information with a manual cue. It has been shown to improve auditory sentence processing in children with hearing aids (Périer et al., 1990, Leybaert et al., 2010) and to help children build more stable phonological representations (Charlier & Leybaert, 2000).
Cochlear implant is a device, which is now widely used to provide deaf children with access to oral speech. However, auditory information remains degraded and two thirds of cochlear implanted children (CI) have persistent language disorders at age 4;6 (Geers et al., 2015).
Using CS enhances speech perception even in CI children (Hage & Leybaert, 2006). It has also been suggested that CS could improve speech intelligibility and sentence production (Hage & Leybaert, 2006). The aim of this study is to (1) assess phonological abilities of CI children, and (2) observe the impact of CS on the development of those skills.
We are using the EULALIES test battery (Meloni et al., 2017), which includes five tasks: Picture-Naming, Pseudoword Repetition, Diadochokinesis, Syllable Repetition and Lexicality Judgment.
In a pilot study, we collected data on 32 normal hearing children (NH) and 22 CI children with CS education (CIcs). As expected, we observed that the percentage consonant correct (PCC) in the Picture-Naming and Pseudoword Repetition tasks were higher in NH than CIcs. However, PCC in the Syllable Repetition task in the CIcs were close to those of NH. The number of syllables in the Diadochokinesis and the score in the Lexicality Judgment task did not differ according to group.
Data on children with cochlear implant alone are currently being recorded. We will compare scores in both CI groups to assess the impact of CS on phonological development.
EULALIES is designed to assess the influence of several factors, which may influence phonological accuracy: syllable number, syllabic structure, and types of features. In addition to these factors we will assess the role of age at implantation, bilateral implantation and chronological age.
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