Perceived contrastive stress production in hearing-impaired and normal-hearing children

Contrastive stress production patterns of 20 moderate-to-severely hearing-impaired children, aged 4:5-18:2 (years:months), were compared with those of 20 normal-hearing children, aged 3:7-6:7. The groups were matched on the basis of a linguistic measure, mean length of utterance. Analyses of judges' responses to the speakers' audiotapes recorded during a conversation-based task yielded evidence of similar production patterns for the groups although considerable individual performance variation was noted. This finding supports the view that language-matched normal and hearing-impaired children may not be very different in their production of this prosodic cue. Results of this study further support the idea that prosodic features of the speech signal enhance intelligibility, a factor which merits consideration in the intelligibility assessment and training of hearing-impaired children.