A Contrast Study On The Chinese Intonation Acoustic Characteristics Between Healthy And Hearing-impaired Children

Intonation is one of the most important features of language, which has the function to distinguish semantics. It is also an important means for people to convey emotions. It is a kind of pitch change in the sentence, which belongs to the prosodic phonemes of phonetics. There are few studies on children's intonation, and fewer on hearing-impaired children's. By far, studies about hearing-impaired children's tone mainly focused on tone's perception and production, while few studies focused on hearing-impaired children's intonation, especially intonation acoustic characteristics. Therefore, the purposes of the present study are as follows:through the way of acoustic analysis, to compare intonation acoustic characteristics of declarative sentence, question sentence, imperative sentence between healthy and hearing-impaired children. To compare groups and ages difference between healthy and hearing-impaired children. To establish the reference ranges of acoustic parameters of healthy children for follow-up studies.First, we have a compare study on intonation acoustic parameters between 30 adults and 91 healthy children. The results show that all the four parameters have main effects on the intonation factor. Which indicates that the parameters:average fundamental frequency F0, whole sentence fundamental frequency slope values k, former clause's(subject) fundamental frequency slope values k1, latter clause's(verb-object structure) fundamental frequency slope k2 are effective to distinguish different intonations. In terms of intonation characteristics, the two groups have the same whole sentence's characteristics on declarative sentence and question sentence, but differ on imperative sentence.Second, we have a contrast study on the intonation acoustic characteristics between 91 healthy children and 31 hearing-impaired children. The results show that in question sentence, slope values k of hearing-impaired children is significantly lower than healthy children's. In imperative sentence, slope values k1 of hearing-impaired children is significantly lower than healthy children's. In addition to that, age is also an important factor which affects the children obtain intonation characteristics. Age 5 is an important stage for children's acquisition and development of the intonation characteristics of declarative sentence and imperative sentence.Based on the above, we believe that slope values k and slope values k1 are the acoustic parameters that can be used to distinguish different intonation characteristics between two group children. Through research, we also obtain intonation characteristics of two group children on declarative sentence, question sentence and imperative sentence, as well as the reference ranges of acoustic parameters of healthy children on that three types of sentences.