A Comparative Analysis On Substitution Errors Of Mandarin Initials Between Typically Developed And Hearing Impaired Children

Initial acquisition error is a common phenomenon in the process of acquiring Mandarin Chinese.Initial substitution exists not only in the phonological acquisition of normal hearing children but also a key point in the speech production and speech therapy of the hearing impaired children.There is few research on the comparative analysis of substitution between normal hearing children and hearing impaired children.Based on the current situation,this thesis tries to do exploratory research on it which is also innovations of the thesis.Participants in the thesis are hearing impaired children aging from 3 years old to 6 years old.Participants were induced to articulate the target phonemes through pictures as well as words following and then all the data collected in the experiments were transcribed,recognized and analyzed.Final results of the whole experiments were used to make comparisons with Norm of Normal Hearing Children's Language Development.The thesis tries to find out error rates and error acquisition patterns of hearing-impaired children and compare the differences and similarities with previous studies.Results show that phonological abilities of children with Cl usage or hearing aids have not yet caught up with the age-matched normal peers and show much lower accuracies.Moreover,the errors of the hearing-impaired subjects indeed tend to show a larger range of substitution types than those made by the hearing children.Furthermore,the acquisition order based on difficulty degree of hearing impaired children is gained as follows:[m>x>t(?)>(?)>t>ts>p>s>l>ph>z tsh>ts>f>n>?h>s>k>t(?)h>tsh>kh].