This study is part of a series on speech-based first impressions of prelingually deaf cochlear implant (CI) users with differing speech intelligibility. Hiring managers with typical hearing (TH) rated CI users and TH young adults on various personality traits and suitability as job applicants after hearing recorded speech samples. Similar to prior…

Speaking intelligibly is an important achievement in children's language development. How far do congenitally severe-to-profound hearing-impaired children who received a cochlear implant (CI) in the first two years of their life advance on the path to intelligibility in comparison to children with typical hearing (NH)? Spontaneous speech samples…

Background: There is a global need for synthetic speech development in multiple languages and dialects, as many children who cannot communicate using their natural voice struggle to find synthetic voices on high-technology devices that match their age, social and linguistic background. Aims: To document multiple stakeholders' perspectives…

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) commonly results in the inability to produce natural speech, making speech-generating devices (SGDs) important. Historically, synthetic voices generated by SGDs were neither unique, nor age- or dialect-appropriate, which depersonalized SGD use. Voices generated by SGDs can now be customized via voice banking and…

Recent studies suggest that benefiting early from both a cochlear implant (CI) and exposure to cued speech (CS, support system for the perception of oral language) positively impacts deaf children's speech perception, speech intelligibility, and reading. This study aims to show how: 1/CS-based speech perception ("cue reading"), and…

Purpose: Speech recognition percent correct scores fail to capture the effort of mentally repairing the perception of speech that was initially misheard. This study measured the effort of listening to stimuli specifically designed to elicit mental repair in adults who use cochlear implants (CIs). Method: CI listeners heard and repeated sentences…

Purpose: The sibling relationship teaches children to navigate social interactions with their peers. However, the presence of an exceptionality, such as hearing loss, in one child can affect the dynamic of this relationship. This article examines quantitative and qualitative effects of having a brother or sister with a cochlear implant (CI) on…

This study examined whether partner reauditorization affected the attitudes reported by young adults toward a child who communicated using nonelectronic AAC. The study also examined preferences for the way the AAC system was used (i.e., in the presence or absence of reauditorization), whether reauditorization was associated with differences in…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to characterize the acoustic profile and to evaluate the intelligibility of vowel productions in prelingually deafened, Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: Twenty-five children with CIs and 20 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH) were recorded producing a list of Mandarin…

Purpose: This study compared the performance of three amplification devices hypothesized to improve speech communication in individuals with hypophonia (HP), as well as to identify individuals' device preferences. Method: Twenty-two individuals with HP and their primary communication partners participated in a cross-over design study comparing…

Purpose: This preliminary research examined (a) the perception of two common sources of indexical variability in speech--regional dialects and foreign accents, and (b) the relation between indexical processing and sentence recognition among prelingually deaf, long-term cochlear implant (CI) users and normal-hearing (NH) peers. Method: Forty-three…

Purpose: This study examined the acoustic properties of Taiwanese (Southern Min) lexical tones produced in esophageal speech (ES) and pneumatic artificial laryngeal speech (PAL), including onset fundamental frequency (F0), slope of F0 contour, duration, and amplitude (intensity) of the vowel portion of syllables carrying seven Taiwanese tones.…

This study evaluated the voice of a modern English text-to-speech (TTS) system in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context in terms of its speech quality, ability to be understood by L2 users, and potential for focus on specific language forms. Twenty-nine Brazilian EFL learners listened to stories and sentences, produced by a TTS voice and…

Listening to speech in a noisy background is difficult for everyone. While such listening has historically been considered mainly in the context of auditory processing, the role of cognition has attracted considerable interest in recent years. This has been particularly true in the context of life-span research and the comparison of younger and…

Purpose: This study seeks to determine how speech-language impairments relate to the frequency and diversity of communication modes and functions produced by children with cerebral palsy (CP) during interactions with their mothers. Method: We studied 40 children with CP (M[subscript age] = 62 months) comprising three groups--those who were unable…