Infants' Implicit Rhyme Perception in Child Songs and Its Relationship With Vocabulary

How Do Enriched Speech Acoustics Support Language Acquisition in Children With Hearing Loss? A Narrative Review

Language outcomes of children with hearing loss remain heterogeneous despite recent advances in treatment and intervention. Consonants with high frequency, in particular, continue to pose challenges to affected children's speech perception and production. In this review, the authors evaluate findings of how enriched child-directed speech and song might function as a form of early family-centered intervention to remedy the effects of hearing loss on consonant acquisition already during infancy. First, they review the developmental trajectory of consonant acquisition and how it is impeded by permanent pediatric hearing loss. Second, they assess how phonetic-prosodic and lexico-structural features of caregiver speech and song could facilitate acquisition of consonants in the high-frequency range. Last, recommendations for clinical routines and further research are expressed.

Children's Neural Sensitivity to Prosodic Features of Natural Speech and Its Significance to Speech Development in Cochlear Implanted Children

Catchy utterances, such as proverbs, verses, and nursery rhymes (i.e., "No pain, no gain" in English), contain strong-prosodic (SP) features and are child-friendly in repeating and memorizing; yet the way those prosodic features encoded by neural activity and their influence on speech development in children are still largely unknown. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), this study investigated the cortical responses to the perception of natural speech sentences with strong/weak-prosodic (SP/WP) features and evaluated the speech communication ability in 21 pre-lingually deaf children with cochlear implantation (CI) and 25 normal hearing (NH) children. A comprehensive evaluation of speech communication ability was conducted on all the participants to explore the potential correlations between neural activities and children's speech development. The SP information evoked right-lateralized cortical responses across a broad brain network in NH children and facilitated the early integration of linguistic information, highlighting children's neural sensitivity to natural SP sentences. In contrast, children with CI showed significantly weaker cortical activation and characteristic deficits in speech perception with SP features, suggesting hearing loss at the early age of life, causing significantly impaired sensitivity to prosodic features of sentences. Importantly, the level of neural sensitivity to SP sentences was significantly related to the speech behaviors of all children participants. These findings demonstrate the significance of speech prosodic features in children's speech development.