Maassen B
J Speech Hear Res. 1986 Jun;29(2):227-30. doi: 10.1044/jshr.2902.227.
Speech of deaf talkers has often been characterized as staccato, leading to the perception of improper grouping of syllables. In an attempt to compensate for this syllabication, word boundaries of 30 sentences spoken by 10 deaf children were acoustically marked by means of silent pauses with a duration of 160 ms inserted between words. Subsequent tests with normal-hearing listeners demonstrated that after insertion of pauses the intelligibility of the sentences increased significantly (p less than .01) from 27% to 31%. A control measure showed that this increase was not merely due to a general deceleration of speech rate: When all phonemes were lengthened until the same sentence duration was obtained as after insertion of pauses, a (nonsignificant) decrease in intelligibility (M = 26%) resulted. The results are compared to earlier studies of speech of the deaf in which segmental and suprasegmental aspects were manipulated.
聋哑人的言语常常被描述为断断续续，导致音节分组不当的感觉。为了弥补这种音节划分问题，对10名聋哑儿童说出的30个句子的词界进行了声学标记，方法是在单词之间插入持续160毫秒的静音停顿。随后对听力正常的听众进行的测试表明，插入停顿后，句子的可懂度从27%显著提高到31%（p小于0.01）。一项对照措施表明，这种提高不仅仅是由于语速普遍减慢：当所有音素都被拉长，直到获得与插入停顿后相同的句子时长时，可懂度出现了（不显著的）下降（M = 26%）。将这些结果与早期对聋哑人言语的研究进行了比较，早期研究中对语音的音段和超音段方面进行了操控。
