A comparison of speech intonation production and perception abilities of Farsi speaking cochlear implanted and normal hearing children Narges Moein a, * , Seyyedeh Maryam Khoddami b , Mohammad Rahim Shahbodaghi b a Language Pathology, Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran b Department of Speech, Language Pathology, Faculty of Rehabilitation, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran article info Article history: Received 13 April 2017 Received in revised form 14 July 2017 Accepted 16 July 2017 Available online 18 July 2017 abstract Introduction: Cochlear implant prosthesis facilitates spoken language development and speech comprehension in children with severe-profound hearing loss. However, this prosthesis is limited in encoding information about fundamental frequency and pitch that are essentially for recognition of speech prosody. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the perception and production of intonation in cochlear implant children and comparison with normal hearing children. Method: This study carried out on 25 cochlear implanted children and 50 children with normal hearing. First, using 10 action pictures statements and questions sentences were extracted. Fundamental fre- quency and pitch changes were identified using Praat software. Then, these sentences were judged by 7 adult listeners. In second stage 20 sentences were played for child and he/she determined whether it was in a question form or statement one. Results: Performance of cochlear implanted children in perception and production of intonation was significantly lower than children with normal hearing. The difference between fundamental frequency and pitch changes in cochlear implanted children and children with normal hearing was significant (P < 0/05). Cochlear implanted children performance in perception and production of intonation has significant correlation with child's age surgery and duration of prosthesis use (P < 0/05). Discussion: The findings of the current study show that cochlear prostheses have limited application in facilitating the perception and production of intonation in cochlear implanted children. It should be noted that the child's age at the surgery and duration of prosthesis's use is important in reduction of this limitation. According to these findings, speech and language pathologists should consider intervention of intonation in treatment program of cochlear implanted children. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction One of the main features of all languages is prosody. Prosody is regimentation of pretty important factors producing the speech signal. It is mostly revealed in the rhythm of the speech and affects various aspects of the speech signal. To display what information in an utterance is important pragmatically, the speakers use the into- nation. In addition, the speakers transmit their pragmatic intentions using intonation. The melody of voice at the larger levels of speech for example discourse and conversation can show intonation [1,2]. There are many important differences in the arrangement of prosodic structures and the organization of intonation events within various languages of the world. Generally, different lan- guages have different intonation and pragmatic patterns. Some languages are tonal (for example Mandarin and Japanese) which have lexical tone and some of them are non-tonal or stress-timed language (such as English or Farsi) [3]. Indeed, the template of pitch changes in the speech is intonation and regularly called melody of language. These pitch changes can occur on words or phrases. Farsi is a stress language. In this lan- guage pitch variations on the words doesn't change their meanings, but does change, for example, an utterance from a statement to a question, or emphasize different words for pragmatic functions. Thus in Farsi as a stress-timed language, a statement can be con- verted to a question by tone (but the meaning of singular words does not change by tone lonely). Yet another use of intonation in Farsi is depicting some extra-linguistic attitudes such as surprise, impatience, sarcasm, etc [4,5]. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: moin.narges@gmail.com (N. Moein). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology journal homepage: http://www.ijporlonline.com/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijporl.2017.07.018 0165-5876/© 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology 101 (2017) 1e6