Deviant speech/voice physiology occurs to a limited extent for some HH children. Of the measures that we examined, those related to vocal fold tension and vocal fold articulation appeared to be most sensitive to the effects of diminished auditory input and feedback that occurs for HH children. Data from this and other studies suggest that abnormally high F0 occurs for about 20% of HH children and may be associated with poor speech perception skills. Future studies should examine whether earlier implantation can help deaf children to produce speech that is at least as normal as that of HH children.

The present work investigates developmental aspects of the duration of point vowels in children with normal hearing compared to those with hearing aids and cochlear implants at four and five years of age. Younger children produced longer vowels than older children, and children with hearing loss produced longer and more variable vowels than their normal hearing peers. In the current study, children with hearing aids and cochlear implants did not perform differently from each other. Test age and hearing loss did not interact, indicating parallel but delayed development in children with hearing loss compared with their typically-developing peers. Variability was found to be concentrated among the high vowels but not in the low vowels . The broad findings of the present work are consistent with previous reports and contribute a detailed description of point vowel duration not in the literature.

It is common among clinicians to ask children to produce their best speech during intervention. However, it is unclear whether children know how to respond to these directions and whether any contingent changes in their production actually result in better speech. Normal and best speech for children with normal hearing (NH) and cochlear implants (CI) were compared on a variety of acoustic measures. The children (7 to 14 years of age) were asked to read ten simple sentences to train up a fictional automatic speech recognizer for children. They subsequently produced the same sentences with their best and then very best, very clearest speech (ostensibly to test the recognizer). Sentence, pause, and vowel duration were calculated for all sentences as well as vowel intensity and fundamental frequency. Additionally, phonetic distinctiveness was evaluated through vowel space size and voice onset time differences between voiced and voiceless stops. NH children demonstrated patterns of best speech that resemble adult clear speech productions. CI children’s speech resembled NH best speech in all elicitation conditions, except that they slowed (their already slower) speaking rate for best speech. The results indicate that clear speech can be produced by children. [Work supported by NIH.]