AUTHOR=Chen Yuebo , Luo Qinqin , Liang Maojin , Gao Leyan , Yang Jingwen , Feng Ruiyan , Liu Jiahao , Qiu Guoxin , Li Yi , Zheng Yiqing , Lu Shuo 

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

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 16 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.892894

DOI=10.3389/fnins.2022.892894

ISSN=1662-453X

ABSTRACT=Catchy utterances, such as proverbs, verses, and nursery rhymes (i.e., “No pain, no gain” in English), contain strong-prosodic features and are child-friendly in repeating and memorizing; yet the way that prosodic features being encoded by neural activity and their influence on speech development in children are still largely unknown. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, this paper investigated the cortical responses to the perception of natural speech sentences with strong/weak-prosodic features and evaluated the speech communication ability in 21 prelingually deaf children with cochlear implantation (CI) and 25 normal hearing 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 strong-prosodic information evoked right-lateralized cortical responses across a broad brain network in normal hearing children, and facilitated early integration of linguistic information, highlighting children’s neural sensitivity to natural strong-prosodic sentences. In contrast, CI children showed significantly weaker cortical activation and characteristic deficits in speech perception with strong-prosodic features, suggesting hearing loss in early age of life causes significantly impaired sensitivity to prosodic features of sentences. Importantly, the level of neural sensitivity to strong-prosodic 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.