The Use of Prosodic Cues in Sentence Processing by Prelingually Deaf Users of Cochlear Implants

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to assess the use of prosodic and contextual cues to focus by prelingually deaf adolescent users of cochlear implants (CIs) when identifying target phonemes. We predict that CI users will have slower reaction times to target phonemes compared with a group of normally-hearing (NH) peers. We also predict that reaction times will be faster when both prosodic and contextual (semantic) cues are provided. Design: Eight prelingually deaf adolescent users of CIs and 8 adolescents with NH completed 2 phoneme-monitoring experiments. Participants were aged between 13 and 18 years. The mean age at implantation for the CI group was 1.8 years (SD: 1.0). In the prosodic condition, reaction times to a target phoneme in a linguistically focused (i.e., stressed) word were compared between the two groups. The semantic condition compared reaction time with target phonemes when contextual cues to focus were provided in addition to prosodic cues. Results: Reaction times of the CI group were slower than those of the NH group in both the prosodic and semantic conditions. A linear mixed model was used to compare reaction times using Group as a fixed factor and Phoneme and Subject as random factors. When only prosodic cues (prosodic condition) to focus location were provided, the mean reaction time of the CI group was 512 msec compared with 317 msec for the NH group, and this difference was significant (p

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