posted on 2018-04-18, 18:05authored bySonia Granlund, Valerie Hazan, Merle Mahon
Purpose: This study aims to examine the clear speaking strategies used by older children when interacting with a peer with hearing loss, focusing on both acoustic and linguistic adaptations in speech.
Method: The Grid task, a problem-solving task developed to elicit spontaneous interactive speech, was used to obtain a range of global acoustic and linguistic measures. Eighteen 9- to 14-year-old children with normal hearing (NH) performed the task in pairs, once with a friend with NH and once with a friend with a hearing impairment (HI).
Results: In HI-directed speech, children increased their fundamental frequency range and midfrequency intensity, decreased the number of words per phrase, and expanded their vowel space area by increasing F1 and F2 range, relative to NH-directed speech. However, participants did not appear to make changes to their articulation rate, the lexical frequency of content words, or lexical diversity when talking to their friend with HI compared with their friend with NH.
Conclusions: Older children show evidence of listener-oriented adaptations to their speech production; although their speech production systems are still developing, they are able to make speech adaptations to benefit the needs of a peer with HI, even without being given a specific instruction to do so.
Supplemental Material S1. Fixed effects for the best-fit model for task transaction time. Number of observations: 82; number of different pairs: 25.
Supplemental Material S2. Fixed effects for the best-fit model for F0 range. Number of observations: 107; number of participants: 16.
Supplemental Material S3. Fixed effects for the best-fit model for mean energy 1-3 k Hz. Number of observations: 111; number of participants: 16.
Supplemental Material S4. Fixed effects for the best-fit model for vowel space area. Number of observations: 32; number of participants: 16.
Supplemental Material S5. Fixed effects for the best-fit model for F1 range. Number of observations: 32; number of participants: 16.
Supplemental Material S6. Fixed effects for the best-fit model for F2 range. Number of observations: 32; number of participants: 16.
Supplemental Material S7. Fixed effects for the best-fit model for words per phrase. Number of observations: 110; number of participants: 16.
Supplemental Material S8. Fixed effects for the best-fit model for lexical frequency. Number of observations: 111; number of participants: 16.
Granlund, S., Hazan, V., & Mahon, M. (2018). Children's acoustic and linguistic adaptations to peers with hearing impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 61, 1055–1069. https://doi.org/10.1044/2017_JSLHR-S-16-0456
Funding
This project was funded by a PhD studentship from the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council linked to Grant RES-062-23-3106.