Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Children with hearing loss before the development of their phonological system display various kinds of atypical speech production characteristics. Cochlear implants (CIs) can lead to improved speech production, although children may vary considerably in their outcomes. Past work suggests that one effect of hearing impairment is poor control over the velopharyngeal system, but little direct data exist to show how CIs improve velopharyngeal function for speech. This work presents nasometer data for Greek-speaking children with CIs, ages 4–16 years, along with age- and gender-matched typically-hearing children. Children produced bisyllabic words varying in stress position and in the type of initial stop consonant: Nasal, voiceless unaspirated, and voiced (which, in Greek, may be produced as prenasalized). The nasal and oral microphone signals from the nasometer were labelled in Praat to demarcate consonantal and vocalic regions. Preliminary analyses on the whole words suggested that children with CIs are comparable to hearing controls for words beginning with nasal consonants, but differed for words with oral consonants. This presentation will present durations and average nasalance over segmental (consonantal and vocalic) regions, permitting more fine-grained assessment of velopharyngeal control.</jats:p>