VOICE QUALITY, ARTICULATION, NASALITY, PROSODY AND OVERALL INTELLIGIBILITY IN THE SPEECH OF SUBJECTS WITH HEARING IMPAIRMENT
VOICE QUALITY, ARTICULATION, NASALITY, PROSODY AND OVERALL INTELLIGIBILITY IN THE SPEECH OF SUBJECTS WITH HEARING IMPAIRMENT

Summary/Abstract: In early infancy, hearing loss significantly affects the development and intelligibility of speech in children with hearing impairment. Assuming that both speech and voice disorders occur in the speech of hearing-impaired speakers, the present study will 1) analyse the speech and overall intelligibility of 91 hearing-impaired speakers (from ages 5 to 23, M = 13 years, 56% males, 44% female) who exhibit an average hearing loss of air conductivity of99 dB (SD = 19.48); 2) compare latent space in the hearing impaired (HI) subjects ’speech and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (known as ICF) speech and voice functions to determine whether they overlap partially or totally; 3) investigate the presence of an autonomous factor of nasality and determine through analysis of the latent structure of speech whether nasality is a matter of articulation or phonation; and 4) investigate the correlations between derivedfactors and speech intelligibility of HI subjects from a closed list of words. Using principal component analysis, four relevantfactors were determined that explained 65.650% of the total variance. The first prosodic factor, the fluency and rhythm of speech, explained 40.036% of the total variance, the second factor of quality of speech production (voice, articulation and resonance) explained 11.430%, the third factor of micro-chaining explained 7.970% and the fourth factor, nasality, explained 6.214%. The ICF and speech factor distributions were similar but not identical. In this study, speech can be seen in terms of four dimension factors on the micro- and macro-segmental levels: prosodic factors, voice, resonance and articulation quality and nasality. The four factors, especially the second factor of voice, resonance and articulation quality, show statistically significant correlations with the intelligibility of speech in HI subjects (p < 0.01).

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