Airflow Characteristics of Fricative Consonants Produced by Normally Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Speakers

The purpose of this study was to investigate the rates of airflow for fricative consonants produced by normally hearing speakers and by hearing-impaired speakers who varied in degree of hearing loss and speech intelligibility. Subjects consisted of 20 normally hearing adults (10 men and 10 women), 20 moderately-to-severely hearing-impaired adults with intelligible speech (10 men and 10 women), and 20 profoundly hearing-impaired adults with semi-intelligible speech (10 men and 10 women). Average airflow rates were obtained for the fricatives /s/,/z/,/f/, and /v/ in CV and VCV syllables. In general, it was found that normally hearing, intelligible hearing-impaired, and some semi-intelligible hearing-impaired speakers produced voiceless fricatives with substantially greater airflow rates than they produced voiced cognates. The data also revealed that both male and female semi-intelligible hearing-impaired speakers produced fricatives in the CV context with greater amounts of airflow and fricatives in the VCV environment with less airflow than did the normally hearing and intelligible hearing-impaired speakers. Further, the male and female semi-intelligible hearing-impaired speakers failed to demonstrate the trend, as exhibited by the other speakers, for lingua-alveolar fricatives to be produced with greater air flow than the labiodental fricatives. The data from this investigation provide additional evidence to support the assumption that some hearing-impaired speakers fail to control and coordinate the biomechanical aspects of speech properly.

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