Iambic Production Advantage and Unbiased Recognition in Word Learning by Mandarin-Speaking Children with Cochlear Implants

This study examines whether Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) exhibit challenges or advantages in learning novel words with overt trochaic versus iambic patterns. Mandarin full-tone words lack salient stress cues, whereas neutral-tone words exhibit a clear trochaic pattern. Given the unique prosody of Mandarin and CI users’ difficulty in acquiring the neutral tone, we predicted distinct effects of lexical stress on word production and recognition. Fifteen Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs and 15 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH) learned 16 pairs of stress-contrasted novel words. A referent-naming task assessed stress production through pattern proportion, accuracy, and acoustic analysis, while a referent-matching task evaluated stress identification and word-referent mapping accuracy. In the naming task, children with CIs showed a preference for iambic words in both frequency and accuracy. They also produced longer second syllables in trochaic words than their NH peers. In the matching task, the CI group performed worse overall, although neither group showed a stress-specific effect. These results indicate that CI users struggle with syllable duration control in trochees. This difficulty reflects both an inability to shorten the unstressed syllable and the potential adoption of a final-syllable lengthening strategy linked to higher prosodic domains. The insensitivity to stress contrast in recognition may stem from the generally weak word-level stress cues in Mandarin.