Residual Hearing and Speech Production in Deaf Children

Residual hearing, phoneme recognition, speech production errors, and selected background variables were examined in 40 congenitally deaf children of normal intelligence who had no apparent anomalies other than deafness, in an effort to identify factors most closely associated with speech intelligibility. Mean intelligibility of the recorded speech of the children, to inexperienced listeners, was 18.7%, corresponding closely with results of previous studies. Scores on the total and some portions of the phoneme recognition test showed significant correlations with both phoneme production and speech intelligibility. The correlation between phoneme production errors and intelligibility was −0.80. A sizable proportion of the dispersion could be accounted for by certain prosodic errors, such as those resulting from improper phonatory control. Errors of place of articulation and voicing remained in essentially the same proportion for all speakers. Errors of manner and combined place and manner of articulation showed a slight systematic decrease from the poorest to the best speakers. Omissions decreased sharply, but not systematically. Vowel errors showed the most marked and systematic decrease as intelligibility improved. Children of deaf parents were poorer in phoneme recognition and in speech intelligibility than children with comparable residual hearing but with hearing parents.