A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON ANALYSIS OF PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN TAMIL SPEAKING HEARING IMPAIRED CHILDREN WITH COCHLEAR IMPLANTS

Phonological Processes are simplification of sounds which occur among the children during the younger age and will gradually diminish giving an adult like speech form. The aim of the present study is to analyze the occurrence of phonological processes among hearing impaired children who underwent cochlear implant surgery during their younger age as an early intervention. The subjects included in the study were 10 children (5 male and 5 female) who were diagnosed with congenital total hearing impairment and underwent cochlear implant surgery and attending Auditory verbal therapy. The task given to the subjects in the present study is to repeat the words in Tamil Articulation Test followed by the Clinician. The words were recorded and further analyzed for the occurrence of phonological processes. The results show that a total of 26 phonological processes (both typical and atypical) occurred with a maximum occurrence of Depalatalization and minimally of Final Consonant Deletion. The results of the present study help in providing a better knowledge about the occurrence of phonological processes which helps the speech language pathologist in intervening hearing impaired children with cochlear implants and to improve their speech intelligibility.

Phonological Processes are simplification of sounds which occur among the children during the younger age and will gradually diminish giving an adult like speech form. The aim of the present study is to analyze the occurrence of phonological processes among hearing impaired children who underwent cochlear implant surgery during their younger age as an early intervention. The subjects included in the study were 10 children (5 male and 5 female) who were diagnosed with congenital total hearing impairment and underwent cochlear implant surgery and attending Auditory verbal therapy. The task given to the subjects in the present study is to repeat the words in Tamil Articulation Test followed by the Clinician. The words were recorded and further analyzed for the occurrence of phonological processes. The results show that a total of 26 phonological processes (both typical and atypical) occurred with a maximum occurrence of Depalatalization and minimally of Final Consonant Deletion. The results of the present study help in providing a better knowledge about the occurrence of phonological processes which helps the speech language pathologist in intervening hearing impaired children with cochlear implants and to improve their speech intelligibility.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….... Introduction:-
Phonology is the study of formulation of sounds which are put together to form words and other linguistic units. Phonology demonstrates the patterns of distinctive sound contrast in a language and to explain the ways speech sounds are organized and represented in mind. Storkel (2006) & Stoel-Gammon (2011) mentioned a close relationship appears to exist between young children's phonological knowledge and their acquisition of vocabulary. Young children usually have difficulty in co-ordinating the movements of their vocal apparatus which results in simplification of complex words. These simplifications results in pronunciation errors and these errors are mentioned as "Phonological Processes" or "Phonological Deviations". As children begin to organize their speech sounds to match those of adult speech forms, the phonological processes will gradually diminish giving an adult speech form.
Bankson and Bernthal (1990) defined phonological processes as "Simplification of a sound class in which target sounds are systematically deleted and/or substituted". Samayan (2015) explained phonological processes are not The recent advancement in rehabilitation of congenital hearing impaired children is COCHLEAR IMPLANT. Cochlear implant helps the hearing impaired children in listening by converting mechanical sound energy into a coded electric stimulus which further stimulates the auditory neural elements directly, bypassing the damaged hair cells of cochlea. Various studies reported the increase in sound repertoire and near normal perfection in articulation skills of hearing impaired children with cochlear implants done at early ages (Tobey & Hasentab, 1991). Chin & Pisoni (2000) reported that the use of cochlear implants improves the inventory of speech sounds in a two year post implant case study. The phonological processes reported by them in 5.8year old were deaspiration, fronting, cluster reduction and deaffrication. Buhler, DeThomasis, Chute and Decora (2007) concluded that cochlear implant children revealed the presence of phonological processes like stopping, cluster reduction, final consonant deletion, velar fronting and liquid simplification.
In Indian context, Ramadevi (2006) examined phonological processes among normal hearing children and hearing impaired children who are native kannada language speakers. The results indicated 54 phonological processes were observed among hearing impaired children with a total of 32 phonological processes found in normal hearing in the age range of 5 to 9 years. Among hearing impaired children, the phonological processes occurred less than 20% were Epenthesis, gliding of liquids and medial vowel deletion; Frequently occurring phonological processes (i.e.) 20 -60% were affrication, alveolar assimilation, backing, partial cluster reduction, final vowel deletion, lateralization, monophthongization, stopping of glides and liquids, voicing, vowel backing, vowel fronting, vowel lengthening, vowel raising and vowel shortening. The most commonly occurring processes i.e. > 60% were cluster reduction, deaspiration, denasalization, devoicing of consonant, fronting of palatals and retroflexes, nasal deletion, stridency deletion and vowel lowering.
In a study by Ravali Mathur (2019), he concluded that the delay in phonological development in children with hearing impairment is found to be more in Hearing impaired children using hearing aids than with cochlear implants. The results showed that among children with cochlear implant group the phonological processes observed more were weak syllable deletion, nasal assismilation, metathesis, prevocalic voicing, diphthongization, vowel fronting, sound intrusion, total cluster reduction, reduplication and backing.

Need Of The Study
In Indian context there is a dearth in phonological processes analysis among hearing impaired children using cochlear implants. Hence the current study focuses on analysis phonological processes occurring among Tamil speaking hearing impaired children who are using cochlear implants.

Aim Of The Study
The aim of the current study is to analyze the occurrence of phonological processes among Tamil speaking hearing impaired children who underwent cochlear implant surgery and undergoing Auditory verbal therapy.

Participants:
The participants included in the study comprised of 10 hearing impaired children (5 male children and 5 female children) in the age range of 3 to 5 years. All the participants were diagnosed as Congenital Bilateral Severe to Profound hearing loss and they underwent cochlear implant surgery at Government Rajaji Hospital, Madurai. All the subjects are undergoing Auditory verbal therapy followed by cochlear implant surgery. All the children are using MED-EL Sonata Ti 100 cochlear implants with OPUS-2 Speech Processor. The Speech Processing strategies and number of channels were not considered for the study. All the subjects present with normal oral peripheral mechanism anatomically and physiologically with no other associated problems.

Test Material:
Tamil Articulation Test developed by Usha (1986) was used for the study. The list of words used for the study are attached in APPENDIX -1.

Procedure:
The consent for participating in the study was obtained from the parents of the participants. All the participants were seated comfortable in front of the computer in a quiet room. The task involved in the study is repetition task. The Clinician sat beside the participant. The subjects were asked to repeat the words in Tamil Articulation Test which were told by the clinician in an audible loudness. All the participants were familiarized to the Tamil Articulation Test word list before the task. The children were permitted to use both auditory and visual cues, any how children were encouraged to use Auditory cues majorly. The words repeated by the subjects were recorded with the help of PRAAT Software. The recorded samples were further analyzed perceptually by three experienced Speech Language Pathologist in regard to the occurrence of phonological processes. The occurred phonological processes were listed for all the participants and they were statistically analyzed.

Results And Discussion:-
The result of the present study depicts the occurrence of phonological processes among hearing impaired children with cochlear implants. The result shows a presence of total of 26 phonological processes among the subjects which included both typical and atypical phonological processes.

Summary and Conclusion:-
The present study was an attempt of analyze the phonological processes in Tamil speaking children with congenital hearing impairment who underwent cochlear implant during their younger age. It was noticed that 26 phonological processes occurred among the subjects. The overall results of the study reflect delayed phonological development among hearing impaired children with cochlear implants. The knowledge about the occurrence and pattern of phonological processes among hearing impaired children with cochlear implant will help the speech language pathologist to design a better management techniques which will help in improving the speech intelligibility of the cochlear implant children. Further studies are recommended with more number of subjects and the occurrence of phonological processes can be compared with typically developing Tamil speaking children.