Perception and Production of Prosody in Children with Hearing Impairment

Abstract

The project aimed to study the production and perception of prosody in children with hearing impairment and compare with typically developing children matched for their language ages. The present study was carried out in two phases. The first phase was pertaining to the training on perception and production of prosody, and the second phase was pertaining to the testing of the perception and production of prosody in terms of stress, intonation, and rhythm. A set of 24 Malayalam sentences was formulated that matches the language age of 3years to 7years, and picture representations of these sentences were made. The training phase included the participants listening to 14 sentence stimuli and responding by selecting appropriate pictures depicting particular prosody. All the participants received a prosody training of 180 minutes and then completed the testing. The testing phase was done using the 10 test stimuli. The participants were instructed to give the appropriate response after listening to the stimuli for the perception task. In the production task, they were instructed to repeat the prosody-loaded sentences presented in a randomized order. The responses were audio-recorded using a digital recorder and were then subjected to acoustic analysis. The measurement and comparison of the parameters of stress, intonation, and rhythm of children with hearing impairment and their language age-matched typically developing children was carried out. There were significant differences found between the groups on perception and production of prosody. A chronology of the development of rhythm was derived from the results of the study. The study results also indicated that prosody training will help increase the clarity and intelligibility and thereby naturalness of the spoken language skill of children with hearing impairment. The current study ascertains the need for conventional speech-language and auditory training to expand and give equal importance to segmental and supra-segmental training in children with hearing impairment.