Communication Sciences and Disorders
Presenter(s): Minh-Chau Vu
Advisor(s): Dr. Mary Fagan
Consonants are speech sounds (i.e., phonemes) created by the complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Consonant phonemes can be divided by manner or type of closure (stop, fricative, affricate, nasal, liquid, and glide), place of articulation (bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, and glottal), and voicing (voiced and voiceless). Previous studies have shown that hearing infants explore vocalizations during mouthing. Mouthing introduced changes in their oral closure and articulatory postures that influenced variation in consonant production and expansion of consonant inventories. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of mouthing on consonant production in infants with profound hearing loss and their age-matched hearing peers. There were four participant groups: infants with profound hearing loss before cochlear implantation; infants with hearing loss who used cochlear implants; and two hearing groups, matched by age to the infants with hearing loss. Participants were videotaped playing with objects for approximately 15 minutes. Their spontaneous speech sounds were then recorded and analyzed. The types of consonants produced are currently being analyzed. We expect to see an increased variation in consonant inventories associated with mouthing in infants with cochlear implants compared to infants with profound hearing loss before cochlear implantation. This increase would suggest that mouthing also aids in consonant development in infants with profound hearing loss after their surgery. With this investigation, we hope to understand the correlation between mouthing and consonant production in cochlear implant recipients and how this correlation compares to that of the hearing infants.