Auditory/vibratory perception of syllabic structure in words by profoundly hearing-impaired children

Sixty monosyllabic, disyllabic, and trisyllabic words were recorded and presented at different times through earphones and vibrators to 20 normal-hearing adults and to 20 profoundly hearing-impaired children to evaluate their perception of number of syllables. Vibratory perception by the profoundly hearing-impaired and normal-hearing subjects and auditory perception by the profoundly hearing-impaired subjects all were similar. Their responses could be predicted by counting the number of prominent energy bursts displayed on the screen of a storage oscilloscope. The subjects' responses obtained under these conditions differed considerably from normal auditory perception, which could be predicted by "dictionary criteria" for syllabification. These findings suggest the need for a special perceptual viewpoint in teaching stress or prosody to profoundly hearing-impaired children.