Speech and Voice Physiology of Children Who Are Hard of Hearing

Abstract

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.

Statistical Learning, Syllable Processing, and Speech Production in Healthy Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Preschool Children

“…Only a subgroup of children with peripheral HL, namely those with unilateral HL, showed a significant difference in consonant duration; we found that they produce consonants with longer duration values than do children with balanced binaural abilities, similar to the findings by Higgins et al (2005). We found no group difference of perseveratory movements of consonant duration, in agreement with Baum and Waldstein (1991).…”

“…Findings from Higgins et al (2005) indicated that most of the produced speech was close to normal apart from aberrant VOT values, which were more severe in female subjects with unbalanced hearing abilities in both ears. Regarding perseveratory coarticulation, a similar precision between children with normal hearing (NH) and HI was found for consonantal duration (Baum & Waldstein 1991).…”

“…Furthermore, children with HI were shown to process speech sounds in a more controlled rather than automatic manner (Jerger 2007), and they presented abnormal temporal speech behaviors particularly related to vocal fold articulation (Paterson 1994;Higgins et al 2005). Findings from Higgins et al (2005) indicated that most of the produced speech was close to normal apart from aberrant VOT values, which were more severe in female subjects with unbalanced hearing abilities in both ears.…”

Noise trauma induced plastic changes in brain regions outside the classical auditory pathway

“…These non-classical auditory areas combine acoustic information with other endogenous and exogenous cues from concerned with emotional, cognitive, motor and other sensory systems in order to respond to events in the environment. The loss of relevant auditory cues can lead to maladaptive changes such as impaired speech production (Waldstein, 1990, Weatherley et al, 1997, Higgins et al, 2005) or emotional responses to sound (Husain et al, 2014). To address this issue, we exposed rats to a high-frequency OBN (10–20 kHz, 104 dB SPL, 35 days) or narrowband noise (16–20 kHz, 104 dB SPL, 8 days) and compared the responses of the LA and Str, which lieouts ide the classical auditory pathway, with those seen in the primary/secondary AC.…”

The influence of the auditory prosthesis type on deaf children's voice quality

“…Some authors refer to a normalisation of fundamental frequency voice values [14]. Other authors state that, after previous studies, the F 0 parameter was about 20% higher in deaf children [16] or that F 0 increased when children stopped receiving hearing feedback with the cochlear implant [17,18]. Other authors, however, have not detected significant improvement in F 0 values despite the use of the implant [11,19,20].…”