About Entrez
Text Version
Entrez PubMed Overview Help | FAQ Tutorial New/Noteworthy E-Utilities
PubMed Services Journals Database MeSH Database Single Citation Matcher Batch Citation Matcher Clinical Queries LinkOut Cubby
Related Resources Order Documents NLM Catalog NLM
Gateway TOXNET Consumer
Health Clinical Alerts ClinicalTrials.gov PubMed
Central
|
|
-
Production of sentence-final
intonation contours by hearing-impaired
children.
Allen GD, Arndorfer
PM.
Department of Audiology and Speech Sciences, Purdue
University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. alleng@msu.edu
Studies of
intonation in the hearing impaired (HI) are often concerned with either
objective measures or listener perceptions. Less often has the focus
been on how these two aspects of communication interrelate. This study
examined the relationship between certain acoustic parameters and
listeners' perceptions of intonation contours produced by HI children.
Six severe-to-profound HI children and 6 normal-hearing (NH) children,
ages 7;9 to 14;7, were individually tape recorded while reading 10
declarative sentences and 10 phonemically matched interrogative
sentences within the context of a script. Each sentence ended with a
carefully chosen disyllabic (target) word. Twelve adult listeners,
inexperienced with the speech of the HI, listened to a randomized audio
tape presentation of all of these productions and categorized each one
as a statement, question, or other. Fundamental frequency (F0) and
duration measurements were obtained for the target (final) word of each
sentence, and intensity measures were recorded for each entire sentence.
Acoustic analysis showed that all 6 of the NH children and 4 of the 6 HI
children produced acoustically different intonation contours for
declarative versus interrogative sentences. The HI children's
productions were, in general, similar to the NH children, in that they
used F0, duration, and intensity cues to mark the distinction. Their
contrastive use of these acoustic cues, however, was less pronounced
than for the NH children. Analysis of listener responses indicated that,
although listeners were able to differentiate between some of the
declarative and interrogative sentences produced by these 4 HI children,
judgments corresponded with their intended type less often for the HI
than for the NH children. (Judgments of NH children's utterances were
100% correct.) Multiple logistic regression of listeners' responses to
the HI children's utterances showed that 4 acoustic measures, all
derived from the sentence-final word, were significantly predictive: (1)
sentence-final F0, (2) slope between the target word's initial and final
F0, (3) duration of the target word, and (4) dB difference between the
target word's 1st and 2nd syllables. Results were similar for the NH
children's data, except that the ratio of the 2 syllables' durations was
significant, rather than total word duration. These findings differ in
several important ways from previously published data for HI children's
intonation contours and suggest that many HI children have the ability
to benefit substantially from training in the production of
intonation.
PMID: 10757695 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
|