Investigation of Speech Intonation in Cochlear Implant Children in the Imitation and Reading Tasks

Intonation is one of the main aspects of speech prosody, which plays an important role in speech intelligibility. Previous studies have shown that the expression of intonation in children with cochlear implant is the most difficult feature of speech prosody. Regarding the importance of intonation in emotional transmission, sentence type, and communication intentions, the aim of the present study was to examine the speech intonation in cochlear implant and normal hearing children in the imitation and reading tasks.

The present descriptive-analytic study was performed on 30 cochlear implant children versus 30 normal-hearing children. The sound was recorded in a quiet room. The participant was asked to utter the sentence “/dare baroun miyad/” in the happiness mood. Then, they were asked to do the same task imitating from the sound which had been recorded earlier. Data recording was done using Praat software and data analysis was done using SPSS software.

The mean of fundamental frequency for the two groups in reading (P=0.004) and imitation (P=0.007), duration in reading (P=<0.001), and imitation (P=0.003) and intensity of the two groups in reading (P=0.01) had a significant difference. Meanwhile, the longest duration was related to the cochlear implantation group and the highest fundamental frequency and intensity was related to the normal group.

Intonation is one of the damaged aspects of speech in children with cochlear implantation, which results in children’s inability to translate emotions verbally. According to the present study, these children's intonation was damaged in imitation and reading tasks. Therefore, it is recommended that, in addition to the segmental aspect of speech, therapists carry out interventions on the speech intonation of these children.