The speech of a postlingually deafened teenager during the first year of use of a multichannel cochlear implant

Abstract

The speech of a profoundly postlingually deafened teenager was recorded before, immediately after, 3 months after, and 1 year after electrical stimulation with a Nucleus multichannel cochlear implant. Listener tests of target words revealed significant improvement in overall quality over the year. Spectrograms showed less aspiration and better definition of the lower formants. Acoustic measurements indicated immediate change in F0 and gradual changes in syllable duration and some aspects of voicing and manner of articulation. Vowel space shrank steadily over the year, with both first- and second-formant frequencies dropping. Prestimulation results are discussed relative to the literature on the speech of the congenitally hearing impaired. Effects of multichannel electrical stimulation on speech are compared with studies of single-electrode stimulation.