Phonetic convergence and imitation of speech by cochlear implant patients

Speech communication can be viewed as an interactive process involving a functional coupling between sensory and motor systems. One striking example comes from phonetic convergence, when speakers unconsciously tend to mimic their interlocutor’s speech during communicative interaction. In order to test whether deaf people with cochlear implantation did recover such perceptuomotor abilities, we measured online imitative changes on the fundamental frequency in relation to acoustic vowel targets in a non-interactive situation of communication during both unintentional and voluntary imitative production tasks. We showed that cochlear implanted participants have the ability to converge to an acoustic target, both intentionally and unintentionally, albeit with a lower degree than normal hearing participants. These results suggest that cochlear implanted patients recovered significant perceptuo-motor abilities less than two years following cochlear implantation.