Nonword Repetition Task

This report presents an analysis of speech productions obtained from 14 children with cochlear implants who completed a nonword repetition task. The stimuli consisted of 20 auditorily-presented multisyllabic nonwords. The analyses reported here include a descriptive analysis of the children’s errors, and a summary of how accurately the children imitated the duration, number of syllables, and initial consonants of the stimulus targets. We found that the children tended to produce imitations which were longer than the duration of the target nonword, but which nevertheless contained the correct number of syllables. In the imitations produced with an incorrect number of syllables, the types of errors observed were similar across children. With regard to the initial consonants, the children generally had more difficulty imitating the place feature than the manner, voicing, or nasality features. Overall, initial coronal segments were imitated correctly more often than non-coronal segments, and stops were imitated correctly more often than fricatives. Voiceless initial segments were imitated correctly more often than voiced initial segments. The labial fricatives were imitated most poorly. In general, the errors observed in the children’s imitations were consistent with previous findings involving the speech of profoundly deaf children and chronologically younger normal-hearing children. However, the children’s poor performance in imitating auditorily-presented labials did not agree with previous studies of pediatric CI users that utilized auditory-visual presentation formats. The children’s nonword repetition performance did not correlate strongly with demographic variables, but was found to be strongly correlated with direct perceptual ratings obtained from normal-hearing adults. Overall, the results of this study indicate that experienced pediatric cochlear implant users are able to utilize their knowledge of the phonological patterns in their ambient language to produce imitations of novel nonword stimuli. Detailed investigation of these nonword imitations can reveal systematic linguistic tendencies and provide new insights into phonological development following cochlear implantation.