METHOD: A total of 336 and 616 acoustic tokens were collected from six CI and 11 NH Malay children, respectively. The groups were matched for hearing age and duration of exposure to Arabic sounds. All the 28 Arabic consonants in the form of consonant-vowel /a/ were presented randomly twice via a loudspeaker at approximately 65 dB SPL. The participants were asked to repeat verbally the stimulus heard in each presentation.
RESULTS: Within the native Malay perceptual space, the two groups responded differently to the Arabic consonants. The dispersed uncategorized assimilation in the CI group was distinct in the confusion matrix (CM), as compared to the NH children. Consonants /ħ/, /tˁ/, /sˁ/ and /ʁ/ were difficult for the CI children, while the most accurate item was /k/ (84%). The CI group transmitted significantly reduced information, especially for place feature transmission, then the NH group (p
METHODS: Participants were matched for hearing age (Mean, M = 7 ± 1.03 years) and duration of exposure to Arabic sounds (M = 2.7 ± 1.2 years). All 28 Arabic phonemes were presented through a loudspeaker and participants pointed to the graphemes associated with the presented phonemes.
RESULTS: A total of 336 and 616 tokens were collected for six children with CI and 11 NH children for each task, i.e., phonemes repetition and phoneme-grapheme correspondence. Both groups found it easier to repeat phonemes than the phoneme-grapheme correspondence. The children with CIs showed more confusion ([ظ, ز, ذ, ض, خ, ب, ه, س, ع, & ث] >10% correct scores) in phoneme-grapheme correspondence than the NH children ([ظ:14%] and [ث: 27%]). There was a significant interaction (p = 0.001) among the three visual graphical features and hearing status (CI and NH).
CONCLUSION: Our results infer that non-native Malay children with CIs and NH use different strategies to process the Arabic graphemes' visual features for phoneme-grapheme correspondence.