An acoustic-articulatory study of the nasal finals in students with and without hearing loss

Abstract

The central aim of this experiment was to compare the articulatory and acoustic characteristics of students with normal hearing (NH) and school aged children with hearing loss (HL), and to explore the articulatory-acoustic relations during the nasal finals. Fourteen HL and 10 control group were enrolled in this study, and the data of 4 HL students were removed because of their high pronunciation error rate. Data were collected using an electromagnetic articulography. The acoustic data and kinematics data of nasal finals were extracted by the phonetics and data processing software, and all data were analyzed by t test and correlation analysis. The paper shows that, the difference was statistically significant ( P<0.05 or P<0.01) in different vowels under the first two formant frequencies (F1, F2), the tongue position and the articulatory-acoustic relations between HL and NH group. The HL group's vertical movement data-F1 relations in /en/ and /eng/ are same as NH group. The conclusion of this study about participants with HL can provide support for speech healing training at increasing pronunciation accuracy in HL participants.