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 examines use of the Goldman-Fristoe Test of Articulation-Second Edition (GFTA-2) with children who use cochlear implants to evaluate whether or not it would be appropriate to use this test with this population. Participants included 15 children with cochlear implants who ranged in age of implantation and amount of implant experience.…

The history of oral teacher preparation in America is both significant and diverse. There are numerous individuals and events that shifted and defined the professional practices of individuals who promote the listening and spoken language development of children with hearing loss. This article provides an overview of this rich history and offers a…

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…

Recent research and development projects on sensory aids for improving speech perception and production of hearing impaired persons were reported at an international Conference on Speech-Processing Aids for the Deaf held at Gallaudet College in 1977. (SBH)

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)

Issues and trends in the preparation of teachers of hearing-impaired children are considered. The following competencies are identified as essential: knowledge and skills in the areas of language acquisition and development, speech development and improvement, and the development of auditory skills. (SEW)

Hearing-impaired speechreaders focus on visual characteristics of speech sounds, termed visemes. Determination of viseme groupings requires consideration of the sound's visible characteristics and articulatory differences of speakers. Coarticulation effects that modify viseme groups include vowel-context effects on consonant viseme groupings,…

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…