A picture identification test for measuring speech discrimination ability in hearing-impaired children was developed in two phases. In the first phase the word stimuli were evaluated to determine whether they were within the recognition vocabulary of the children and whether the pictorial representations of the words were adequate. Before the second phase, the test was revised to consist of 25 plates with 6 pictures on each plate, with only 4 of the pictures on each plate used as test stimuli. These 4 lists were given to 61 hearing-impaired children on two separate occasions. The results indicate reliability coefficients in excess of 0.87 for all four lists, with mean differences of less than 3% and correlation coefficients between lists greater than 0.84. The test appears to be a potentially valuable clinical tool in pediatric audiology. We call it the Word Intelligibility by Picture Identification test (WIPI).

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Acoustic data for female esophageal speakers is sparse, particularly with regard to characteristics of female tracheoesophageal speakers. This study quantified and compared six acoustic characteristics of excellent female tracheoesophageal (TE), standard esophageal (SE), and laryngeal (LA) speakers. Results indicated there were no significant differences between TE and SE speakers with regard to mean F0 of sustained /a/, mean F0 (reading), signal-to-noise ratio, total duration of passage read, number of pauses, or syllables per minute. Significant differences were found between LA speakers and both alaryngeal groups for all variables, with the exception of mean F0 (reading).

Acoustic characteristics of American English sentence stress produced by native Mandarin speakers are reported. Fundamental frequency (F0), vowel duration, and vowel intensity in the sentence-level stress produced by 40 Mandarin speakers were compared to those of 40 American English speakers. Results obtained from two methods of stress calculation indicated that Mandarin speakers of American English are able to differentiate stressed and unstressed words according to features of F0, duration, and intensity. Although the group of Mandarin speakers were able to signal stress in their sentence productions, the acoustic characteristics of stress were not identical to the American speakers. Mandarin speakers were found to produce stressed words with a significantly higher F0 and shorter duration compared to the American speakers. The groups also differed in production of unstressed words with Mandarin speakers using a higher F0 and greater intensity compared to American speakers. Although the acoustic differences observed may reflect an interference of L1 Mandarin in the production of L2 American English, the outcome of this study suggests no critical divergence between these speakers in the way they implement American English sentence stress.