This paper is concerned with a quantitative description of the phonation characteristics of deaf talkers and the manner in which those characteristics differ as a function of the student's training background. A total of 40 deaf high school students (20 male and 20 female), ages 15–18, served as subjects. All subjects were prelingually deaf, with hearing losses of 90 dB or more in the better ear. Eighteen of the deaf subjects had received all of their formal speech training at the Clarke School for the Deaf, where only the oral method is used. Twenty-two deaf subjects had received all of their communication training at the Rochester School for the Deaf, where the method of combining fingerspelling and speech is used. An analogous group of normally hearing high school students was used for comparison. Speech samples were recorded as the subjects read a phonetically balanced paragraph. The high-quality speech recordings were digitalized and subsequently processed using a period-by-period computer analysis program. This method provided information about each subject's mean fundamental frequency, variability and skewness of the distribution, and phonation time ratio. The results are discussed both in terms of group performance and individual differences.