Perception of coarticulatory cues in the speech of children with profound hearing loss and children with normal hearing.

Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues in the speech of children with profound hearing loss and children with normal hearing. To examine anticipatory coarticulation, five repetitions of the syllables [section i section u ti tu ki ku] produced by nine children with hearing loss and nine children with normal hearing were edited to include only the aperiodic consonantal portion. To explore perseveratory coarticulation, comparable segments were excised from the syllables [i section u section it ut it uk]. The stimuli had been analyzed previously in two acoustic studies of coarticulation (Baum & Waldstein, 1991; Waldstein & Baum, 1991). Ten listeners were presented with the aperiodic segment and were asked to identify the missing vowel. Overall, listeners' vowel identification was better for the productions by children with normal hearing than for those by children with hearing loss. In anticipatory contexts, listeners were able to identify the absent vowel with better-than-chance accuracy for all productions by both groups except the [i] tokens following [section] produced by children with hearing loss. In perseveratory contexts, identification accuracy was significantly above chance for all except the [i] tokens preceding [t] produced by children with normal hearing, but only for [u] tokens produced by children with hearing loss. Identification accuracy was better in anticipatory than in perseveratory contexts for both speaker groups' productions. The patterning of vowel identification, however, differed for the two speaker groups in anticipatory but not perseveratory contexts.