Pitch deviancy and intelligibility of deaf speech.

The relationship between pitch deviancy and other aspects of speech production that affect intelligibiliyy of deaf speech was investigated. The speech skills assessed included the following: ratings of pitch deviancy, ratings of overall intelligibility, production of the prosodic features--stress, intonation, and pause, and production of phonemes. Children who could not sustain phonation had speech that was consistently judged unintelligible. This group of children also had pure tone averages greater than 90 dB. For the remaining children, the relationship among pitch deviancy, intelligibility, and hearing level was variable. The highest intercorrelations were among prosodic feature production, phoneme production, and intelligibility.