Speech Science Forum - Ying Chen

This preliminary study investigated the perception and production of Mandarin rimes by Chinese children with cleft palate (CP) and normal middle ear function but a high risk of auditory processing disorder. Eleven post-surgery CP children and eleven typically developing (TD) children aged 4-10 years participated in the experiments. The production experiments tested 36 tokens of high-frequency disyllabic words in Mandarin and involved articulatory and acoustic measures. The perception experiments used the same 36 target Mandarin syllables in an identification task and 32 monosyllabic words in English in a discrimination task.

The articulatory measurement showed that the CP children produced significantly higher vowel nasality than the TD children in monophthong rimes. Vowel nasality increased as vowel height increased in both monophthong and nasal rimes by both child groups. Results of acoustic measures reconfirmed that CP children produced higher nasality in non-high vowels than TD children. Perceptually the CP children were more confused between monophthong rimes and nasal rimes than the TD children in the Mandarin identification task. However, group difference was not statistically significant in the English discrimination task, except that the TD children’s accuracy in discriminating monophthong rimes and alveolar nasal rimes was slightly higher than that of CP children.

These findings provide evidence for the hyper-nasality symptom of CP children even after the palatal surgery and call attention to proper post-operation articulatory training. The perceptual confusion of monophthong rimes and nasal rimes by the CP children can be attributed to the high risk of auditory processing disorder but confounded with language experience in comparison to the TD children. The misperception, on the other hand, may have also affected the accuracy of the production.

This event will be hosted online as well: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/97718702895?pwd=UzhOcHlwMTd4NWZFWGVTNGZwTndCQT09