Voice Onset Time for Turkish Stop Consonants in Adult Cochlear Implanted Patients

The voice onset time is a temporal acoustic parameter defined as the time between the release of the oral constriction for plosive production and the onset of vocal fold vibrations. Hearing impairment is one of the factors that can effect the magnitude of voice onset time. Since voice onset time is a useful, noninvasive method for documenting the articulatory–phonatory aspects of vocal training during speech, we investigated voice onset time values for Turkish stop consonants in adult cochlear implanted patients in order to clarify the effect of CI and sequential hearing rehabilitation over voice onset time values. The CI patients were divided into two groups according to duration of CI usage. We looked for relations between results of the study and average voice onset time values in Turkish language for adults. Mean VOT values for for both males and females in the first and second group are shown in Tables 1, 2, 3, and 4. Most syllables both in males and females statistically significant differ from average VOT values, e.g. They did not reach to normal hearing adults level. These acoustic results indicated that VOT may be an effective measure for examining the effect of cochlear implantation over the articulatory accuracy. As far as we know, this is the first publication using voice onset time values for the efficiency of cochlear implantation in adult patients.Table 1Table 2Table 3Table 4 © 2014, Association of Otolaryngologists of India.