Developmental trends in voice onset time (VOT) of plosives in pediatric cochlear implantees

The present research aims at studying the developmental trends of the voice onset time (VOT) of plosives in children who have received cochlear implant primary to and following the exposure to the primary school education. 18 children with cochlear implant were selected randomly in Fars cochlear Implant Center. They had received the implant in the age range of 2 to 4, their rehabilitation sessions immediately followed the implant and at least 1 year had passed from the time they had received implant. They were divided to 3 groups: 1.pre-school 2-school beginners 3-final graders. They were given a list of words of the form “oral plosive +vowel+ consonant” and recorded in a quiet room, using Praat software version 6.0.13 and Logitech microphone. The VOT measure for each given child was attained through acoustic analysis of the recorded voices by Praat software version 6.0.13. Then, the obtained results were statistically analyzed utilizing the SPSS software to determine how effective education can be for the VOT in language production of children with cochlear implant, based on the collected data. Secondary data from normal hearing children aged 4 to 6 years old and the adults were utilized for comparison. All 3 groups displayed roughly the same behavior and recurring cases of overlaps were detected between the voiced and unvoiced pairs in all groups, which can be interpreted as inappropriate VOT amount for plosives produced by all experimentees. This suggests that exposure to the primary school education has failed to prove as influential in the developmental trends of VOT of the plosives uttered by the children with cochlear implant.