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A survey was conducted to describe the demographic characteristics and perceived adequacy of pre-professional training of those providing speech-language services to children with hearing loss. Results indicated that, while speech-language pathologists are the major providers of speech-language teaching, audiologists and educators also provide these services. Speech-language pathologists reported that they felt they were better prepared in the fundamentals of speech and language, but least prepared in specific areas related to audiology, deafness, and clinical procedures with clients who are deaf or hard of hearing.

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Hearing-impaired persons with reduced voicing perception for final fricatives were studied for improvement in perception via training or enhancement of the vowel duration cue. Ten utterances each of the syllables/bæf, bæs, bæv, bæz/composed three stimulus sets that were graded for the magnitude of the vowel duration cue. These sets were used differentially among 25 hearing-impaired listeners to train and test voicing perception. When enhanced, the vowels of the utterances were lengthened before voiced fricatives and shortened before voiceless fricatives. Training for the utterances with unmodified vowels yielded a small performance improvement for a subgroup of 14 listeners. In comparison, this subgroup showed considerably more improvement for the utterances with vowel duration enhancements. Another subgroup of 5 listeners displayed good fricative voicing perception independent of training or the vowel duration enhancements. A remaining subgroup of 6 listeners manifested poor use of the maximum unmodified vowel duration cues, even subsequent to training. This group showed a significant improvement in perception only for the voiced fricatives when extra duration enhancement and further training were used. This subgroup also demonstrated the poorest performance for a measure of vowel duration discrimination. Among the auditory variables examined, the listeners' tone thresholds at 250 Hz showed the highest relation to perception of fricative voicing.