This study examined articulatory error patterns and phonological process use in 25 preschool children with hearing loss enrolled in three Canadian auditory-verbal intervention programs, and compared their performance to a control group of 35 children with typical hearing based on the GFTA-2 and the KLPA-2. Significant differences were found in the…

This study examined the speech perception, speech, and language developmental progress of 25 children with hearing loss (mean Pure-Tone Average [PTA] 79.37 dB HL) in an auditory verbal therapy program. Children were tested initially and then 21 months later on a battery of assessments. The speech and language results over time were compared with…

Twelve severely hearing-impaired teenagers lipread syllables, words, and sentences spoken by normally articulating talkers. Viseme categories were determined for each talker through the use of a hierarchial clustering analysis. Results indicated that the number of consonant visemes, different for each talker, was related to the talker's word and…

Sixteen measures thought to be related to the intelligibility of speech of hearing impaired children were examined with 42 deaf children (aged 4 to 19). Results indicated that intelligibility of speech was correlated with several parameters not conventionally used in speech assessment (breath control, suprasegmental perception and production,…

A program of individual therapy to reduce harsh/tense voice quality was evaluated with ten deaf adults (ages 19-35 years). (Author/DLS)

The efficacy of speech training using meaningful versus nonmeaningful verbal stimuli with 10 severely and profoundly hearing-impaired elementary children was investigated. Results indicated that both syllable and word training improved imitative production of target phonemes in trained contexts. Word training was significantly more effective for…

The study evaluated the importance to successful lipreading of a specific visual memory for mouth shape sequences in 23 hearing impaired children (11 to 16 years old) and 16 adults. Results suggested the use of sequence-memory training with articulatory shapes for lipreading instruction. (Author/SB)

This study of 60 young adults found that longer closure durations occurred in initial stop consonants compared with medial stops, and in bilabial stops compared with lingua-alveolar stops. Semi-intelligible hearing-impaired speakers produced stop consonants with longer closure durations than hearing young adults and hearing-impaired young adults…

Analysis of speech characteristics during oral reading by hearing-impaired young adults (N=260) indicated significant relationships between perceptual judgments of pitch level and vocal frequencies for both males and females. While data indicated a wide range of vocal frequencies, most subjects spoke at a level within normal range. (Author/CB)

Analysis of spoken repetitions of linguistically-controlled sentences by severely and profoundly hearing-impaired 6- to 19-year-olds (N=45) revealed that grammatical category significantly affected articulatory accuracy of target phonemes, while no effects due to syntactic complexity were noted. No differences were seen in performance between age…

A study analyzed frequency of occurrence of consonants, vowels, and diphthongs, syllabic structure of the words, and segmental structure of the 311 monosyllabic words of 500 words that occur most frequently in English. Three mannerisms of articulation accounted for nearly 75 percent of all consonant occurrences: stops, semi-vowels, and nasals.…

A course developed at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf helped eight students improve speech intelligibility on the telephone, through individualized instruction, use of prerecorded audiocassettes, and independent telephone use. The students improved significantly more than control students on two of three articulation measures and on…

Fifty-four audiologists were asked to predict future speech intelligibility in hearing-impaired children based on four pure-tone audiograms. Predictions varied significantly with degree of loss and status of high-frequency hearing. Audiologists with greater clinical experience had less faith in audiograms as predictors of speech skills than had…

This article describes the Colorado Phonetic/Phonologic Assessment of Hearing-Impaired Infants and Toddlers (PHONE) and the speech of 91 hearing-impaired infants and toddlers, examining number of vowels, consonants, elements per utterance, and utterances; differences by age and by hearing loss for each vowel and consonant; and relationship to…

The speech production of a prelingually deafened adult male was examined at 4 intervals: 1 week and again at 9 months postimplant with a single-channel cochlear implant, 14 months later with a nonfunctioning device, and 1 year following implantation with a multichannel device. Consonant accuracy and vowel accuracy changed little across conditions.…