Speech production of hearing-impaired children and adolescents of an auditory rehabilitation program

Abstract

Studies show that children and adolescents with hearing loss may have difficulties in speech production, impacting on the aspect of speech intelligibility. The speech intelligibility assessment demonstrates its importance to understand and characterize the disorders that may be involved in the oral communication process and help in speech therapy conduct. Different aspects involved in the speech production of hearing-impaired children and adolescents can impact speech intelligibility. Studies that investigate the speech intelligibility of this group, from the phonetic-phonological perspective are scarce in the literature, mainly at the national level. Thus, this research may contribute to the therapeutic planning of auditory rehabilitation. This study aims to characterize the speech production of a group of hearing-impaired children and adolescents who underwent hearing aids or cochlear implants of a hearing rehabilitation program. The study will be carried out with the analysis of data filed in a database of the Laboratório de Análise Acústica - LAAc/UNESP/Marília. The results extracted from the database will be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Statistical tests will be applied to compare the Percentage of Consonants Correct index and the Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised index, which were collected from different speech samples, and for the analysis of these indexes to the degrees of speech intelligibility of the participants. The qualitative analysis will be performed by the participants' production variability regarding the phonological system.