Some voice fundamental frequency characteristics of oral reading and spontaneous speech by hard-of-hearing young women.

Fundamental frequency (f) characteristics of 12 hard-of-hearing young women were compared with those of 12 normal-hearing control subjects during oral reading and spontaneous speech. The normal-hearing individuals almost always used greater mean f omicron and variability for oral reading than for spontaneous speech, but the hard-of-hearing subjects did not. On the average, greater f means and smaller f standard deviations were observed for the hard-of-hearing group than for the control group, regardless of the speaking conditions. In addition f distributions of the hard-of-hearing subjects were characterized by negative skewness whereas those of the normal-hearing subjects were positively skewed.