C G Hustedde | PubMed Health

PubMed1991

Consonant-recognition patterns and self-assessment of hearing handicap.

Two companion experiments were conducted with normal-hearing subjects and subjects with high-frequency, sensorineural hearing loss. In Experiment 1, the validity of a self-assessment device of hearing handicap was evaluated in two groups of hearing-impaired listeners with significantly different consonant-recognition ability. Data for the Hearing Performance Inventory--Revised (Lamb, Owens, & Schubert, 1983) did not reveal differences in self-perceived handicap for the two groups of hearing-impaired listeners; it was sensitive to perceived differences in hearing abilities for listeners who did and did not have a hearing loss. Experiment 2 was aimed at evaluation of consonant error patterns that accounted for observed group differences in consonant-recognition ability. Error patterns on the Nonsense-Syllable Test (NST) across the two subject groups differed in both degree and type of error. Listeners in the group with poorer NST performance always demonstrated greater difficulty with selected low-frequency and high-frequency syllables than did listeners in the group with better NST performance. Overall, the NST was sensitive to differences in consonant-recognition ability for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners.

Adult↗

PubMed1987

Phonetic development in identical twins differing in auditory function.

The subjects of this report are identical (monozygotic) twin boys who differ in auditory function. One has normal hearing; the other has a profound hearing loss bilaterally. These boys offered a rare opportunity to study the effects of hearing loss on vocal development with reasonable control over environmental and genetic factors. This initial report focuses on their vocal development over the sampled ages of 8, 12, and 15 months. Acoustic-phonetic differences in the babbling of the two boys were evident in the 8-month sample (the first recording opportunity), and some differences between them became greater over the succeeding samples at 12 and 15 months. The major differences were in the formant patterns of vocalic elements; the frequency of occurrence of fricatives, affricates, and trills; histograms of syllable type; and variation in vowel usage. The data hold implications for the early identification of infants at risk for communication disorder and for the understanding of auditory-motor processes in phonetic development during infancy.

Child Language↗