Acoustic analyses of contrastive stress production in children with normal and impaired hearing.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the acoustic cues used by listeners making judgments of contrastive stress production in two groups of speakers: (1) children with normal hearing ranging in age from 3 to 6; and (2) children with severe-to-profound hearing loss ranging in age from 4 to 18 who were language matched to the normally hearing group. Children performed a picture-description task of pairs of photographs that varied in agent, action, or object. The second sentence of the pair was designed to have one semantic category as the stressed target. Perceptual judgments of stress in these speakers were reported in Weiss etal. [J. Speech Hear. Res. 28, 26–35 (1985)]. Subjects were divided into four groups according to hearing status and high or low listener agreement of produced stress. Measures of fundamental frequency (F0), relative intensity, and relative duration were made. Both normally hearing and hearing-impaired groups had speakers who increased F0 for stressed words within an utterance as well as those who did not vary F0 or varied nontarget words. In addition, F0 rise was observed less frequently in the object (word final) position for all speakers. Duration and intensity effects were more variable for both groups. [Work supported by NIH.]