Acoustic comparison of CV syllables in French-speaking children with normal hearing, moderate-to-severe and profound hearing impairment

Abstract

Acoustic measures of (1) syllable duration, (2) voice onset time, (3) fundamental frequency (F0) and (4) the first three formant frequencies (F1, F2, F3) of vowels were provided for a speech corpus produced by 10 French-speaking children (five boys, five girls, with an average age of 9;4 years) with profound hearing impairment (i.e. pure tone averages of more than 100 dB HL.) These data were then compared with previously published data for children with moderate-to-severe hearing impairment (i.e. pure tone averages of more than 60 dB HL) and normally hearing children. The children with profound hearing loss were significantly different in all measures from peers with moderate-to-severe hearing loss and normally hearing peers, while children with moderate-to-severe hearing impairment were not significantly different from their normally hearing peers.