%0 Journal Article %T Comparing the formant frequencies of three Persian long vowels produced by cochlear-implanted and normal-hearing children %J Journal of Research in Rehabilitation Sciences %I Isfahan University of Medical Sciences %Z 1735-7519 %A Jafary, Narges %A Torabineghad, Farhad %A Eslami, Moharam %A Ghorbani, Ali %A Jalaei, Shohreh %A Sameni, Jalal %A Mahmoudi, Elham %A Nilfroush, Mohammad Hossein %D 2013 %\ 01/01/2013 %V 8 %N 6 %P 1045-1053 %! Comparing the formant frequencies of three Persian long vowels produced by cochlear-implanted and normal-hearing children %R 10.22122/jrrs.v8i6.724 %X Introduction: The feedback provided by auditory apparatus equips normal hearing people with an important controlling mechanism over the speech production processes. The speech of hearing-impaired children is both perceptually and acoustically abnormal. This study tried to compare the formant frequencies of three long vowels in Persian-speaking children who used cochlear implant and those who were of normal-hearing ability.Materials and Methods: 20 Cochlear-implanted (CI) children and 20 normal-hearing children with the age ranged from 5 to 10 years participated in this study. All participants were native speakers of Persian who were asked to produce prolonged vowels /i/, /u/ and /ɒ/. The averaged F1 and F2 were calculated for each examinee using Praat software (version 5.3.13). Independent t test was conducted to examine the possible differences thatF1 and F2 values and F2 to F1 ratios may have in the two groups.Results: Study results revealed a relative increase in the F1 mean values of all the three vowels produced by CI children. This difference was, however, significant only in the first formant of vowel /i/ (P = 0.011).The mean values of F2/F1 ratio for vowel /i/ showed a statistically significant difference between the two groups (P = 0.01).Conclusion: F1 formants are increased in cochlear-implant children. This condition might be due to a process in which the lack of auditory feedback is compensated by the proprioceptive feedback that is provided through the exaggerated articulation. The changes in F1 and F2 imply a reduced vowel space, in other words, vowel space is slightly centralized in CI children.Keywords: Acoustic analysis, Formant frequency, Cochlear implant, Natural speech, Persian %U https://jrrs.mui.ac.ir/article_16621_3a034dbccc11656f165564a149633b86.pdf