Consonant production and language skills in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants.

OBJECTIVES To investigate the phonemic inventories of syllable-initial consonants in Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants, assessing the relationship between the children's mastery levels of consonant production and their receptive and expressive language skills. DESIGN Descriptive study. SETTING Chi-Mei Medical Center, Tainan, Taiwan. PATIENTS The 30 prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants who participated in the study ranged in age from 6 years to 12 years 6 months, and their age at implantation ranged from 2 years 3 months to 10 years 3 months. The average length of device experience was 3 years 7 months (range, 1 year 7 months to 6 years 5 months). None of the children was identified with concomitant learning disabilities. OUTCOME MEASURES The 21 Mandarin syllable-initial consonants were elicited using a set of 105 pictures. Two language assessment tools were used to evaluate the children's receptive vocabulary skills as well as their overall receptive and expressive language development. RESULTS The mean +/- SD score for correct consonant production was 57.9% +/- 19.5%. Regarding the manner of articulation, plosives received the highest average correct percentage whereas nasals, affricates, fricatives, and the lateral approximant /l/ were less frequently correct. The children's overall percentage of correct scores for consonant production and receptive vocabulary measure were significantly correlated (r = 0.51; P =.005). Additionally, correlation coefficients were significant between the overall score for correct consonant production and both the scores for receptive language measure (r = 0.65; P<.001) and expressive language measure (r = 0.76; P<.001). The participants' consonant production skills were negatively correlated with age at implantation (r = - 0.46; P =.01) and positively correlated with length of experience with cochlear implant (r = 0.45; P =.02). CONCLUSIONS Mastery levels of Mandarin syllable-initial consonants remained moderately low in prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants. The present results suggest a significant association between consonant production skills and language development in these children.