This article presents an interview with Susan R. Easterbrooks, a professor of deaf education in the Educational Psychology and Special Education Department at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and Ellen L. Estes, the coordinator of the Katherine Hamm Center at the Atlanta Speech School, on their new book "Helping Deaf and Hard of Hearing…

The researchers explored the effectiveness of Visual Phonics as a reading instructional tool when used in conjunction with a modified version of the Fountas and Pinnell Kindergarten Phonics Curriculum (Fountas & Pinnell, 2002) with a preschool student who was deaf. The study participant was a 4-year-old deaf child who had a cochlear implant.…

Purpose: To assess the effects of short- and long-term changes in auditory feedback on vowel and sibilant contrasts and to evaluate hypotheses arising from a model of speech motor planning. Method: The perception and production of vowel and sibilant contrasts were measured in 8 postlingually deafened adults prior to activation of their cochlear…

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…

Consonant production following the sensory restoration of audition was investigated in 22 prelinguistically deaf French children who received cochlear implants. Spontaneous speech productions were recorded at 6, 12, and 18 months post-surgery and consonant inventories were derived from both glossable and non-glossable phones using two acquisition…

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

Examined was the use of immediate and continous corrective tactile feedback for the improvement of speaking intonation with 12 deaf students aged 12 to 16 years. (Author/DB)

Two experimental groups (N=10) of deaf students (mean age ten years) who were mainstreamed in ordinary schools showed greater improvement in reading, articulation, and rate of utterance than control deaf students in special schools. (CL)

Laboratory results are presented which suggest that hearing-impaired individuals' speech perception can be enhanced through use of tactile aids with a number of tactile transducers conveying information about the spectral content of the speech signal, and speech production can be improved through experience using a multichannel tactile aid.…

Glossometry, a method of providing visual feedback of tongue positions, was used to teach four vowel sounds to six profoundly hearing-impaired children. After 15 to 20 50-minute training sessions, all subjects showed greater diversification of tongue postures for the vowels. Listener identifications were also generally better after therapy.…

Compared speaking rates, digit span, and speech timing in profoundly deaf 8- and 9-year-olds with cochlear implants and normal-hearing children. Found that deaf children displayed longer sentence durations and pauses during recall and shorter digit spans than normal-hearing children. Articulation rates strongly correlated with immediate memory…

A voice training program to improve pitch register was developed for profoundly hearing-impaired young adults. Ten students of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf completed the program; results showed a significant reduction in pitch level, as well as improvement in pitch control and word intelligibility. (Author/JDD)