NIH

Project Summary
NIH: Maternal speech to infants with and without hearing loss 

Very little is known about the linguistic development of language in infants with hearing loss, particularly infants with cochlear implants. For normal-hearing children, the quality of maternal speech input has been shown to play a role in language development. Many questions remain about the nature of speech input received by children and how it shapes the development of linguistic competency by children. In an NIH/NIDCD-funded research project, we are actively investigating how acoustic, phonetic, and prosodic properties of maternal speech influence the development of speech and language skills in infants with hearing loss and normal-hearing infants.