Experiments were performed to examine changes in the intelligibility of temporally interrupted sentences when white noise was introduced during the speech-free interval. In experiment 1, listeners received the test material under two conditions at five interruption rates ranging from 0.77 to 3.85 interruptions per second (ips). In one instance the speech-free interval was silent, while in the other it was switched to noise of the same average level as the speech. Experiment 2 examined the intelligibility of the speech message as a function of signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio. The switching rate was held constant at 1.5 ips and the S/N ratio was varied from --30 to + 18 dB. Results indicated that for the particular interruption conditions selected, speech switched to noise is significantly more intelligible than speech interrupted by silence. In addition, intelligibility of the interrupted sentences in the presence of intervening noise varies with the S/N ratio.

A repetition task was employed to investigate syntactic patterns of hard-of-hearing children. The subjects were 11 students enrolled in public-school classes for the hard-of-hearing. A matching control group of normal-hearing children was selected from the same schools. It was found that both groups tended to use grammatical constructions rather than nongrammatical approximations. The hard-of-hearing group, however, achieved significantly lower means in each grammatical form tested, and tended to substitute simpler forms. This lower level of performance seemed to represent a difference of degree rather than kind, as the experimental group displayed linguistic performance similar to the control group but showed a general delay in language development.

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