Perception of prosodic features in speech

To determine the subject’s ability to pick up on prosodic features of speech, an in-house test was developed by our lead speech and language therapist consisting of a voice recording of 10 sentences. One sentence at a time is played and the participant has to circle/underline the stressed word in the sentence on a sheet of paper with the sentences written down. The stressed word is often described to the participant as the important word in the sentence. Participants have to be literate to complete the test, although further applications are considered with pictures replacing written words. An initial pilot study revealed normal hearing subjects outperformed bilateral CI subjects, with both outperforming unilateral CI participants (figure 2).