LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Perception of Phoneme Contrast in Children with
Hearing Impairment in Telugu

S. Raja, M. Sc. (Audiology & Speech Language Pathology)
S. B. Rathna Kumar, M. Sc. (Speech & Hearing), Ph.D. (Applied Linguistics) Scholar
S. G. R. Prakash, M. Sc. (Speech & Hearing), Ph.D. (Applied Linguistics)
B. Madhu Sudarshan Reddy, B. Sc. (Audiology & Speech Language Pathology) Student

Speech perception is the processes of transforming a continuously changing acoustic signal into discrete linguistic units (Rvachew & Grawburg 2006).

Phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of a language. Phoneme within a particular language helps in differentiating one word from another. Phoneme is merely a linguistic unit, which has no perceptual reality in speech perception (Warren 1976). Phoneme perception is a form of auditory perception in which the listener and speaker distinguish among the sound contrasts in a language.

Auditory discrimination includes the ability to contrast sounds in environmental as well as the sounds and their pattern in language. Auditory discrimination is an ability to discriminate between the sounds at the articulatory, acoustics and other cognitive levels. Nicolosi, Harryman & Kreschech (1978) defined discrimination as the process of distinguishing among the speech sounds or words by differentiating them as same or different, while Wood (1971) defined auditory discrimination as the ability to discriminate between sounds of different frequency, intensity and pressure patterns; the ability to distinguish one speech from another (on the basis of these acoustic differences).

Development of Perception

Nittrouer & Burton (2005) showed that developmental course in speech perception occurs as a result of the child's experience with spoken language which produces a gradual accumulation of knowledge about the acoustic-phonetic cues that best represent the phonological units that are important in the ambient language system. The development of language-specific speech perception begins in infancy and continues into late childhood (Hazan & Barrett 2000). Phonemic perception plays crucial role in language processing and numerous behavioural studies have demonstrated similar capacities in infants and adults. Dehaene-Lambertz (1997) studied an event related potential by using phonemic discrimination tasks and compared them to results from the adults. The striking similarities observed both in behaviour and in evoked response potentials between the initial and mature stages suggest continuity in processing and neural structures.

Development of perception beyond the period of early childhood involves recognition of words. Word recognition is a complex process, involving the integration of both the sensory input, or acoustic-phonetic signal, and contextual information. The contextual information involves both pragmatic and general knowledge-based inferences regarding the gist of the incoming message and specific structural effects relating to the phonotactic, syntactic, and semantic restrictions characteristic to a language (Tyler & Frauenfelder 1987). On the whole, school-age children process continuous speech in an adult-like way, making use of context to aid in the interpretation of the acoustic signal (Tyler & Marslen-Wilson 1981). In several respects, children are different from adults; they appear to need more acoustic information before they commit themselves to a decision as to word identity, perhaps because so many words continue to be unfamiliar, at least up to the teens (Cole & Perfetti 1980; Walley & Metsala 1990).

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