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Objectives: This study examined syntactic development of auditory comprehension of sentences in Japanese-speaking school-age children with and without hearing impairment. Methods: In total, 592 preschool and school-age children (421 normal-hearing and 171 hearing-impaired) were included in this cross-sectional observation study conducted using the Syntactic Processing Test for Aphasia for Japanese language users. Linear regression analysis was used to determine the estimated age at which each syntactic structure was acquired. Results: Acquisition of syntactic structures was observed in hearing-impaired and normal-hearing children. Basic word order sentences of agent-object-verb and the goal benefactive construction were acquired at preschool age (earlier group), whereas reverse word order sentences of object-agent-verb, source benefactive construction, passive voice, and relative clauses were acquired at school age (later group). The results showed that many hearing-impaired children may not acquire Japanese grammatical structures until the age of 12 years. Conclusions: Adequate screening for language development for school-age hearing-impaired children is required for an effective intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the computer assisted instruction (CAI) system for testing and training discrimination ability of change in voice pitch through the cochlear implant. In the cochlear implant, change in voice pitch is transmitted through the periodicity of change in density of neural pulse trains excited by the electrical signal. In the CAI system, stimuli having an arbitrary degree of contrast between each pair of original speech samples to be discriminated were prepared, by interpolating between the acoustical properties of the pair in the speech analysis-synthesis program STRAIGHT.