Listeners (N=120) heard test words in three conditions: in sentences, as isolated words, and as segmented words. For both experienced and inexperienced listeners, scores varied systematically depending on the relative predicted intelligibility of the test words and the amount of context in the sentence. (Author/CL)

Using cinefluorography, this investigation evaluated how the bilabial and dorsal stop closure postures of two hearing and five deaf adult speakers varied with vowel context. Results supported the suggestion that some speakers who learn speech without audition may develop a different articulatory coordination than hearing speakers. (Author/DB)

Synthetic speech-like articulations were presented to normal hearing adult subjects (N=13) via the visual modality with computer generated animations. Results indicated that most subjects categorically labeled the animations of speech articulations with sharp transitions between phonemic categories. Results have implications for speechreading.…

The use of cues to voicing perception of initial stop consonants in multiple spoken syllables was studied for moderately/severely hearing impaired (N=43) and normal-hearing listeners (N=12). Results confirmed that voice onset time was a strong voicing cue for both hearing impaired and normal hearing listeners. (Author/DB)

Results of this investigation involving 50 deaf and 50 hearing students (14-18 years old) indicate extensive use of visual matching test-taking strategies by deaf subjects but not by hearing subjects. The extent of strategy use was not related to deaf subjects' overall performance on the lookback test. (Author/CL)

Results of a comparative study of speech-like vocalizations of a deaf infant and 11 hearing infants indicated that from eight to 13 months, the deaf subject differed strikingly from hearing infants of comparable age. The topography of the deaf infant's vocalizations resembled that of four- to six-month-old hearing infants. (Author/CL)

Analysis of videotapes generated by four deaf and four hearing 12- to 15-year-olds revealed that deaf Ss showed considerable use of creative language devices when evaluated in sign rather than vocal language. Deaf Ss produced traditional types of figurative constructions at a rate equal to their hearing age mates. (Author/CL)

Researchers and educators of the deaf often suggest that deaf children have a particular problem in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. The paper reports two experiments whose results are incompatible with this view. (Author)

The measures of comprehension showed that four-fifths of the children scored lower than the 10th percentile for second-grade hearing children, and two-thirds scored at or below the 1st percentile. Evaluating production, 68 percent of the sentences produced by the children contained semantic, syntactic, or semantic-syntactic errors. (Author)

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues by 10 college age adults in the speech of 9 children with profound hearing loss and 9 children with normal hearing. Overall, listeners were able to identify vowels in productions by both groups though the patterning of vowel identification differed for the two speaker groups in…

Amount recalled did not differ between the hearing and deaf groups on the normal story, but the deaf children were superior in amount recalled for both confused stories. However, the deaf children made significantly more distortions in their recall than did the hearing children. (Author)

Word boundaries of 30 sentences spoken by deaf children were acoustically marked by means of silent pauses between words. Subsequent tests with normal-hearing listeners demonstrated that after insertion of pauses the intelligibility of the sentences increased significantly. Results are compared to studies in which segmental and suprasegmental…

Analysis of interaction between pairs of deaf and hearing preschoolers indicated that both roles in dialogue (speaker-initiator and speaker-responder) were used by dyads, but their pattern of performance was different. Deaf speaker-initiators displayed a narrower range of complexity in their utterances while deaf speaker-responders were less…

As part of an ongoing evaluation of the Tactile Vocoder, a device that allows the acoustic waveform to be felt as a vibrational pattern on the skin, two prelingually profoundly deaf teenagers reached criterion on a 50-word vocabulary (live voice, single speaker) after 28.5 and 24.0 hours of training. (Author/DB)