Some Effects of Phonotactic Probabilities on the Processing of Spoken Words and Nonwords by Post-Lingually Deafened Adults with Cochlear Implants1

Abstract. Probabilistic phonotactics refers to the frequency with which segments and sequences of segments occur in syllables and words. Knowledge of phonotactics has been shown to be an important source of information in segmenting and recognizing speech in normal hearing listeners. A post-perceptual task (nonword rating) and two on-line tasks (an auditory same-different and an auditory lexical decision task) were used in the present set of experiments to examine the use of phonotactic information by post-lingually deafened adults who have received a cochlear implant. The results of all three experiments showed that both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners are sensitive to differences in phonotactic information to varying degrees. Furthermore, cochlear implant patients with better word recognition abilities (as measured by the NU-6) tended to be more sensitive to phonotactic information than cochlear implant patients with poorer word recognition abilities. The implications of these results for outcome assessments and clinical interventions are discussed