Consonant Inventories of the Better Cochlear Implant Children in Korea

말지각 능력이 우수한 인공와우 착용 아동들의 조음 특성 : 정밀전사 분석 방법을 중심으로

The purpose of this study is 1) to investigate the phoneme inventories and phonological processes of cochlear implant(CI) children and 2) to describe their utterances using narrow phonetic transcription method. All ten subjects had more than 2 year-experience with CI and showed more than 85 % open-set sentence perception abilities. Average consonant accuracy was 81.36 % and it was improved up to 87.41% when distortion errors were not counted. They showed similar phonological processing patterns to HA or normal hearing children in some way as well as different phonological processing patterns from HA or normal hearing children. The prominent distortion error pattern was weakening of consonants. Every subject had his/her idiosyncratic error pattern that demanded his/her own individualized therapy program.