Morphological boundaries and the timing of stressed vowels produced by profoundly hearing‐impaired adults

Abstract

Stressed vowel duration is decreased when a derivational suffix is added to a base word and/or the voicing characteristic of the following consonant is altered. These effects were studied in ten normal‐hearing and ten profoundly hearing‐impaired adults. Each subject read 108 target words imbedded in sentences. The target words were constructed from nine CVC base words by adding a derivational suffix and/or changing the voicing characteristic of the consonant following the vowel. Vowel‐duration measurements were made from a digitized oscillographic trace of the speech wave. Results indicate that the hearing‐impaired adults do not observe normal vowel duration recoding, and the observed patterns of vowel duration recoding are highly consistent and idiosyncratic. Four hearing‐impaired subjects consistently increased rather than decreased the duration of the stressed vowel when a derivational suffix was added to the base word. These results are discussed relative to the nature of the articulatory program used...