The Lombard effect in children with cochlear implants: suprasegmental aspects

Clin Linguist Phon. 2024 Apr 28:1-21. doi: 10.1080/02699206.2024.2340096. Online ahead of print.ABSTRACTChildren with cochlear implants (CI) communicate in noisy environments, such as in classrooms, where multiple talkers and reverberation are present. Speakers compensate for noise via the 'Lombard effect'. The present study examined the Lombard effect on the intensity and duration of stressed vowels in the speech of children with Cochlear Implants (CIs) as compared to children with Normal Hearing (NH), focusing on the effects of speech-shaped noise (SSN) and speech-shaped noise with reverberation (SSN+Reverberation). The sample consisted of 7 children with CIs and 7 children with NH, aged 7-12 years. Regarding intensity, a) children with CIs produced stressed vowels with an overall greater intensity across acoustic conditions as compared to NH peers, b) both groups increased their stressed vowel intensity for all vowels from Quiet to both noise conditions, and c) children with NH further increased their intensity when reverberation was added to SSN, esp. for the vowel/u/. Regarding duration, longer stressed vowels were produced by children with CIs as compared to NH in Quiet and SSN conditions but the effect was retained only for the vowels/i/,/o/and/u/when reverberation was added to noise. The SSN+Reverberation condition induced systematic lengthening in stressed vowels for children with NH. Furthermore, although greater intensity and duration ratios of stressed/unstressed ...
Source: Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Source Type: research