Work

Acoustic Characteristics of Vowel Production in Children with Cochlear Implants Using a Multi-View Fusion Model

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This study aims to examine the acoustic characteristics of Mandarin vowels produced by children with cochlear implants and to explore the differences in their speech production compared with those of children with normal hearing. We propose a multiview model-based method for vowel feature analysis. This approach involves extracting and fusing formant features, Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), and linear predictive coding coefficients (LPCCs) to comprehensively represent vowel articulation. We conducted k-means clustering on individual features and applied multiview clustering to the fused features. The results showed that children with cochlear implants formed discernible vowel clusters in the formant space, though with lower compactness than those of normal-hearing children. Furthermore, the MFCCs and LPCCs features revealed significant inter-group differences. Most importantly, the multiview model, utilizing fused features, achieved superior clustering performance compared to any single feature. These findings demonstrated that effective fusion of frequency domain features provided a more comprehensive representation of phonetic characteristics, offering potential value for clinical assessment and targeted speech intervention in children with hearing impairment.

Source: Algorithms

DOI: 10.3390/a19010009

Authors: Qingqing Xie, Jing Wang, Ling Du, Lifang Zhang, Yanan Li

Institutions: China Civil Affairs University, Tiangong University

Language: English

Topic: Phonetics and Phonology Research

Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,930