Odnos prozodije, obilježja slušne habilitacije i razumljivosti govora kod osoba s prelingvalnim oštećenjem sluha
The relationship between prosody, the characteristics of aural habilitation, and speech intelligibility in persons with prelingual hearing impairment

Summary/Abstract: This paper examined the acoustic characteristics of the speech prosody of 19 young prelingually hearing impaired speakers (mean age 19.7 years; mean pure-tone average threshold in better ear 98.95 dB HL) and their relations to speech intelligibility, residual hearing, and audiologic/speech-language intervention characteristics (type of intervention, age when first hearing aid was fitted, daily use of hearing aid, and type of electro-acoustic device used). By using the Praat 4.3.21. program, speaking fundamental frequency, speech intensity, voice quality (alpha ratio), and speech tempo were measured from recorded samples of readings of simple text; intonation was analyzed in the reading of pairs of sentences that differed only in type (declarative vs. interrogative); the control of speech pauses was analyzed in the reading of pairs of sentences that differed only in the placement of speech pauses. Intelligibility was assessed by using an unstandardized words and sentences identification test (Bonetti, 2008; Bonetti et al., 2008), which included the evaluationof selected speech samples by 17 listeners with no prior experience in communication with people with hearing loss. Statistical analysis (STATISTICA 7.0) included descriptive, correlation, regression, and generalized cluster analysis, Wilcoxon signed-rank test , Chi-square test and Mann-Whitney U test, with p<0.05 as the adopted level of significance. Significant correspondence was observed between speech prosody and intelligibility, but not between prosody and better ear pure-tone average. Higher prosodic “accuracy” was linked to oral orientation in habilitation/education and to greater daily use of an electro-acoustic device. These results suggest that prosody training should in general be more strongly focused on temporal aspects of speech and that the success of the intervention, at least when speech quality is a criterion, depends on constant and maximum active participation of the remaining hearing in communication.

• Details
• Contents