The study comparing effects of speaking rate and clear versus conversational speech to intelligibility by the hard of hearing concluded that simple processing to alter the relative durations of the speech materials was not adequate to assess the contribution of speaking rate to intelligibility differences. (Author/DB)

Seven children (8-12 years old) with language disorders associated with convulsive disorders participated in two divided-attention tasks in which pairs of sentences were presented simultaneously. Results showed that slowing presentation of the primary sentences significantly improved performance on secondary sentences, even though secondary…

The differential effects of normal and emphatic stress on the auditory comprehension performance of nine aphasic and five normal adults were assessed. The aphasic subjects demonstrated significantly better performance for stimuli presented with emphatic stress. (Author/DB)

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)

The contribution of reduced speaking rate to the intelligibility of "clear" speech was evaluated by adjusting the durations of speech segments in various ways for both hard-of-hearing listeners and listeners with normal hearing. The intelligibility advantage of clear speech over conversational speech was confirmed for both groups of…

This study evaluated speech intelligibility under noise conditions of varying peaks (10, 20, and 30 decibels) in frequency response, with 26 listeners with sensorineural impaired hearing who used hearing aids and 10 listeners with normal hearing. Results indicated that the peaks affected speech intelligibility more for listeners with impaired than…

The study with 10 agrammatic aphasic (Broca) adults examined their difficulties using determiners in sentence comprehension. Results included the findings that printed rather than spoken presentation yielded significant improvement for the proper noun/common noun distinction, and that performance was poorer for the mass noun/count noun…

The study examined the effects of forward time gating (in which incremented portions of a word are presented) and word length on monosyllabic isolated word-recognition performance with 20 female college undergraduates. Listeners recognized time-gated words less frequently and with less confidence, and word length significantly influenced…

Evaluation of the speech perception of eight children (ages four and five) with specific language impairments and documented morphological difficulties found these children to be especially weak in discriminating speech stimuli whose contrastive portions had shorter durations than the noncontrastive portions (typical of English grammatical…

This study examined keyword signing (KWS), a communication approach used with nonspeaking individuals. Acoustic measures and judgments of 20 adult listeners were used to evaluate KWS and Spoken-Only narratives. KWS narratives were produced with a slower articulation rate, because of increased pause and speech segment duration and increased pause…

Two approaches to auditory training for improved speech recognition using 20 adults with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing impairments were compared. No significant differences were found between group one which spent training time on activities involving sentence perception and perceptual strategy and group two which focused on consonant…

This investigation documented how hearing-impaired adults (n=8) use communication repair strategies and attempted to change these strategies by communication therapy. Subjects practiced using alternative repair strategies when they did not correctly speechread a videotaped sentence. After therapy, subjects utilized the "repeat" strategy less and…