Practice of Nursery Rhymes to Enhance Mandarin Lexical Tone Performance in Children with a Cochlear Implant - A Pilot Study

• Main Authors: Chang, Su Ying, 張素瑩
• Other Authors: Dr. Peng, Shu-Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/84068168114134410669

碩士 === 國立臺北護理健康大學 === 聽語障礙科學研究所 === 100 === The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of practicing Mandarin nursery rhymes on the lexical tone perception and production by preschool aged children with a cochlear implant (CI). Six subjects, ranging from 2 years, six months to 6 years of age, participated in this study. All children had a bilateral severe or profound sensorineural hearing loss, and received a cochlear implant. They were randomly assigned to the experimental or control group (3 in each group), and were matched according to their CI use and language skills. The results indicated that subjects in the experimental group performed better than those in the control group in the paired tone identification task (particularly for the contrasts, "Tone 1 vs. Tone 3", "Tone 1 vs. Tone 4", and "Tone 2 vs. Tone 4"), as well as in the tone production task (particularly for the accuracy in producing Tone 3 and Tone 4). The acoustic analyses of subjects’ lexical tone production revealed that the F0 contours of Tone 4 produced by the subjects in the experimental group were more precise than the contours produced by the subjects in the control group. The duration of tone production was not found to differ significantly between the experimental and control groups. The present results suggest that nursery rhymes may be applied as treatment materials in the speech therapy program for children with a CI to improve their performance on lexical tone perception and production. Keywords: lexical tones, hearing loss, cochlear implants, nursery rhymes