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Vowel Production in Persian Deaf Children with Cochlear Implant: is the Age of Implantation an Important Factor?

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Abstract

Proper production of vowels has great significance in speech intelligibility. Evidence shows that cochlear implantation has a significant impact on language and reading abilities in some children immediately after the surgery. The aim of the present study is comparing the quality of 6 simple Persian vowels between two groups of cochlear-implanted children under and over 2 years old. This was a cross-sectional analytic study conducted on 70 children who were implanted under the age of 2, 70 children who were implanted over the age of 2 and 238 normal children as control group. For data analysis, the SFS win acoustic analysis was used. Result of this study showed that F2/i/, f1/e/, f2/e/, f2/∞/, f1/a/, F2/a/, f1/o/, F2/o/and F2/u/means had significant difference between three groups (P < 0.05). Children implanted under the age of 2 showed similar performance as normal children in vowel production. Early cochlear implantation (under the age of 2) affects the quality of simple Persian vowel production significantly as well as the increase of speech intelligibility.

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Notes

  1. Vibration of the vocal cords provides sound source. This sound source consists of a fundamental frequency and its harmonics that are multiples of the fundamental frequency. Then this sound is changed with shape of oral cavity. The speech cavity acts like a filter and strengthening some harmonic frequencies and weakening others. Those Frequencies that strengthened are called "Formant". Formants generally determine the differences between the vowels [20].

  2. Speech Filing System.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Hossein Rezaei for his help in editing the English language in our article. Also we are very grateful to the children who took part in this study. The research was supported by University of social welfare and rehabilitation sciences.

Conflict of interest

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation Research Center, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran

    Peyman Zamani

  2. Faculty of Rehabilitation Sciences, Hamadan University of Medical Sciences & Health Services, Hamadan, Iran

    Amir Rahmanirasa & Mohammad Rezaei

  3. Faculty of Medical Sciences, Hamadan University of Medical Sciences & Health Services, Hamadan, Iran

    Farhad Farahani

  4. Iran University of Medical Science & Health Services, Tehran, Iran

    Farzad Weisi & Ayub Valadbeigi

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  1. Peyman Zamani
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  2. Amir Rahmanirasa
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  6. Mohammad Rezaei
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Correspondence to Mohammad Rezaei.

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Zamani, P., Rahmanirasa, A., Weisi, F. et al. Vowel Production in Persian Deaf Children with Cochlear Implant: is the Age of Implantation an Important Factor?. Indian J Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg 66, 407–413 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12070-014-0727-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12070-014-0727-1

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