Features and results of a speech improvement experiment on hard of hearing children

Abstract

In this paper we present a two-year-long speech training experiment in which we have studied the extent of improvement owing to multimodal visual support as compared to traditional methods. The hypothesis that children having more severe hearing impairment benefit more from visual assistance was also tested. 30 children had extracurricular lessons with the visual support of the Speech Assistant (SA) system providing complex services. The control group (CG) – that was comprised of another 30 children – got the same amount of extracurricular lessons and was improved with traditional methods, without the help of the SA. A subjective test was used to evaluate the speech samples of all children involved in the experiment recorded at the beginning and at the end of the two-year speech improvement period. The results of the two-year improvement clearly demonstrate that the SA helps in acquiring speech production in the examined age-group. The results also suggest that children having more severe hearing impairment benefit more from visual support. From the multimodal visual assistance including the talking head, the bar charts and the display of prosody, children gained valuable information that could be used in improving speech production. It is a question of further investigations to measure how much each of these facilities adds to the children's progress.