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Mémoires Année : 2017

Prosodic focus acquisition in French early cochlear implanted children

Résumé

Speech and hearing are important elements in the action of communication and are interrelated closely. If any of these elements is altered, communication can be affected. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), hearing impairment and deafness are defined as follows: “Hearing impairment is the inability to hear as well as someone with normal hearing. Hearing impaired people can be hard of hearing or deaf. If a person cannot hear at all, then they have deafness” (WHO, 2017). Their February 2017 updated report, shows that around 32 million children around the world suffer from invalidating hearing impairment (WHO, 2017). The impact of hearing deficiency varies on different levels. On the social and emotional levels, the person affected by hearing impairment risks isolation and exclusion from social life cycle. On the economical level, hearing impairment is estimated by the WHO of having an annual cost of 750 billion international dollars worldwide. It includes health sector costs, educational support costs, loss of productivity, and costs for the society (WHO, 2017). Cochlear implantation (CI) has been considered as the sole surgery that can replace efficiently a sensorial organ by an electronic device that has been able to progressively restore an almost normal hearing function. This has provided hearing impaired children with a new beginning and almost full communication capabilities (Bruijnzeel, Ziylan, Stegeman, Topsakal, & Grolman, 2016). Age at implantation is crucial for auditory and speech development in pre-lingually hearing impaired children. Normal function of the central pathways is a requirement for normal development of speech and language skills. Children with hearing loss risk losing these skills. The absence of auditory input hinders normal growth needed to form a functional sensory system. CIs bypass peripheral cochlear damage, stimulating auditory nerve to prevent the detrimental effects of stimulus deprivation (Sharma, Gilley, Dorman, & Baldwin, 2007). Prosody, the melody of speech, is an important element in communication; in both speech perception and production (D’Imperio, Dittinger, & Besson, 2016; Nygaard, Herold, & Namy, 2009; Speer & Ito, 2009). It is a determinant aspect of speech in order to correctly send a linguistic and paralinguistic message. It is defined as a grammatical component of language including accentuation, phrasing and intonation (Beckman, 1996; D’Imperio et al., 2016). Among the functions of prosody and accentuation, information structure is responsible for the focus/background separation within an utterance. Rooth in 1985 introduced the idea that each expression comes with two semantic meanings; its regular denotation and a set of alternatives. Prosodic focus or prominence is used to create these alternatives (Rooth, 1985). Where the accent is placed can change according to context and to the message that should be sent to the audience, as well as the real speaker’s intentions (Nygaard et al., 2009). Focus can be broad, when focusing on a whole utterance, or narrow when focusing on a word or a segment in an utterance. Narrow focus can be contrastive, when contrasting between different elements, or corrective, when correcting a wrong information. Prosodic focus is acquired progressively with the fine-tuning of communication skills and matures with age. This is the first study of prosodic focus in early CI French children. Our results show that early CI French speaking children start to produce prosodic focus at the age of 6 years while starting to become adult-like at the age of 7 years. They are better in using prosodic cues to focus in corrective than contrastive narrow focus than broad focus contexts.
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Dates et versions

dumas-03771324 , version 1 (07-09-2022)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : dumas-03771324 , version 1

Citer

Chadi Farah. Prosodic focus acquisition in French early cochlear implanted children. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2017. ⟨dumas-03771324⟩
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