| Abstract | [Introduction]
One of the most devastating effects of congenital hearing loss is that normal development of speech is often disrupted. As a consequence, most hearing-imapired children must be taught the speech skills that normal-hearing children readily acquire during the first few years of life. Although some hearing-impaired children develop intelligible speech, many do not. for many years it was believed that profoundly hearing-impaired children were incapable of learning to talk. Carrying this belief to the extreme, Froeschels (1932) even suggested that all deaf children exhibited some behavior problems “due to the fact that the profuse motor release connected with speech is impossible in their case” (p.97).
Within the last decade, advances have been made in studying the speech of the hearing impaired. This is largely due to the development of sophisticated processing and analysis techniques in speech science, electrical engineering, and computer science that have increased our knowledge of normal speech production. In turn, these technological advances have been applied to the analysis of speech of the hearing impaired as well as to the development of clinical assessment and training procedures.
The oral communication skills of hearing-imapired children have long been of concern to educators of the hearing-impaired, speech-language pathologists, and audiologist because the adequacy of such skills can influence the social, educationally, and career opportunities available to these individuals. Since the introduction of PL 94-142 and the emphasis on mainstreaming, there is an even grater likelyhood that many professionals will need to learn about, or upgrade their knowledge of, the speech of hearing-impaired children. The intent of this article is to provide the clinician, student, and researcher with a comprehensive description of the speech characteristics of this population. It is assumed that the the reader has some familiarity with the effect of congenital hearing loss on speech and language development as well as some exposure to acoustic and articulatory phonetics. It should be noted that the majority of information available about the hearing impaired is concerned with children with severe and profound sensorineural hearing losses (losses of 70 dB HTL or greater). In comparison, relatively little is known about the speech of hard-of-hearing children (losses less than 70 dBHTL). It is for this reason that most of this article is devoted to children who are severely and profoundly hearing impaired.
In order to present an in-depth coverage of speech production processes, we have opted to discuss language skills only in those instances where there is no clear-cut separation between language and speech. Likewise, the auditory skills of the hearing impaired will be discussed only to the extent that factors such as hearing level and auditory capabilities affect speech production skills. The emphasis on speech production is not meant to suggest that an aural/oral teaching method is the only appropriate educational plan for hearing-impaired children. The issues involving educational methodologies are not of primary concern here. Rather, it is the belief of the authors that every hearing-impaired child is entitled to speech training services even if a realistic goal of such training may be only the development of functional (survival) speech skills. Before optimal teaching strategies can be selected, however, teachers and clinicians must have a thorough understanding of the nature of the problems that they are trying to remediate. |
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