Therapy for reduction of continuous phonation in the hard-of-hearing population.

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Continuous phonation, though not always apparent to a listener, is frequently present in the speech of patients with congenital or long-standing profound hearing loss. Major effects of such continuous voicing are to transform unvoiced speech sounds into their voiced counterparts and to make more difficult the perception of the end of one word and the beginning of the next. These effects greatly reduce the intelligibility of speech. A procedure is described which has dramatically improved the speech of several hard-of-hearing patients with long histories of poor speech intelligibility.