The aim of the present work was to test the comprehension and production of prosodic events by prelingual deaf children trained in oral communication with reference to several groups of control subjects (hearing-impaired, normal hearing ones). The recorded database children speech contains several lists of sentences of different linguistic form and function. The most developed studies concerned the group of profoundly deaf children after 5 years of regular oral language education by a new experimental method without the use of sign language. This group recorded these lists of sentences at the end of the education and 20 years later at adult age. The analysis was aimed at the tonal level of the speech and its temporal parameters. The main question was whether it is possible to teach deaf children to correctly control the prosodic inflections of F0 and the variations of segmental duration. The results of education were verified at adult age, 20 years later and they indicate that this group of profoundly deaf subject are still able to reproduce correctly the pitch contours as they result from the phonosyntactic models of Polish intonation. The speaking rate at adult age is shorter than it was at child age. This results from 20 years of practice using speech for communication.
Cite as: Gubrynowicz, R. (2002) A study of speech prosody of subjects with profound hearing loss recorded at child age and 20 years later. Proc. Speech Prosody 2002, 359-362
@inproceedings{gubrynowicz02_speechprosody,
author={Ryszard Gubrynowicz},
title={{A study of speech prosody of subjects with profound hearing loss recorded at child age and 20 years later}},
year=2002,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2002},
pages={359--362}
}