Formant Frequencies of Laughter in Children with and Without Hearing Impairment

Abstract

The present study extracted the formant frequencies (F1 , F2 ) of laughter produced by Children with Hearing Impairment (CHI) and compared it with normal hearing children. Laughter of fifteen male CHI in the age range of 5-12 years were elicited using funny movie clips and compared with age and gender matched normal peers. The laughs were stored separately for each speaker onto a computer memory and frequency of the first two formants at the midpoint of the laughter was extracted using PRAAT -5114 software. The results revealed that CHI showed a slightly reduced F1 though statistically not significant and statistically higher F2 which is statistically significant compared to normal hearing children. This indicates that CHI used a relatively more neutral and less distinctive tongue configuration compared to the normal peers. This study throws light on the coordination of subsystems of speech/laughter in CHI. Further studies are required to justify the present findings with more number of samples.