Speech Rhythm in Hearing-Impaired Children

Abstract

Rhythm, a prosodic feature, refers to an event repeated regularly over a period of time. Research on speech rhythm in the last few years has been largely concerned with attempting to search for the acoustic correlates of rhythmic classification. Speech rhythm in pathological cases has not been studied extensively. In this context, the present study investigated speech rhythm in normal and hearing-impaired children using Pairwise Variability Index (PVI) index. The PVI is one measure used to calculate the extent of unit-to-unit variation in speech. Twenty normal hearing and twenty hearing impaired Kannada speaking children in the age range of 5-10 years participated in the study. The subject's spontaneous speech and narrations were audio recorded and stored onto computer. The vocalic and intervocalic durations were measured using Cool Edit Pro software. The results revealed longer vocalic and intervocalic durations in hearing- impaired children in comparison with normals. It is concluded that both the hearing- impaired and normal children have unclassified rhythmic patterns.