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Prosody in Speech Produced by Deaf Persons

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper was to examine prosody in speech produced by deaf persons, and to determine whether there is connection between average hearing loss and control of certain prosodic feature (speech fundamental frequency, intonation, accent, pauses and speech rate). 12 prelingual deaf adolescents read testing material constructed to examine their control of selected prosodic features. In order to determine possible influence of pure tone average (PTA) on the observed prosodic features, the subjects were divided in two groups: subjects with PTA between 90 and 110 dB (N=8), and subjects with PTA above 110 dB (N=4). The differences between these groups were tested by using robust discriminant analysis. The results showed that the control of some prosodic features is related to PTA score - significant differences between groups of subjects were found in the ability to control the intonation, the use of pauses and the speech rate – which indicates that prosody is not uniformly affected in the category of deafness, but that some prosodic features remain preserved with lower degrees of deafness. On the other hand, the descriptive analysis showed substantial differences within groups, which indicates that some deaf persons with extremely high PTA score have potential to develop the same amount of control of some prosodic features as deaf persons with lower PTA score. Results of both descriptive and robust discriminant analysis indicate that PTA is not the measure sensitive enough to express the remaining ability of deaf persons to control prosody.

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