A pilot study of SPINE test scores and measures of tongue deviancy in speakers with severe-to-profound hearing loss.
Two developments show promise in the assessment and remediation of defective speech production in persons with hearing loss. A perceptual speech-intelligibility test, the SPINE (for Speech Intelligibility Evaluation), is a simple, clinician-administered instrument which is valid, reliable, and clinically efficient. In addition, the development of acoustic measures of tongue deviancy, computed from formant frequencies, makes possible a direct lateral visualization of tongue placement in relation to standard vowel placement. In this study, SPINE test scores of 28 persons with severe-to-profound hearing loss were correlated with two measures of tongue deviancy during production of the vowels /i/, /a/, and /u/. For both measures of tongue deviancy, correlations with the SPINE were significant for the three vowels combined and for the isolated vowel /i/. These findings suggest that clinicians may ultimately have two different but complementary means of assessing speech production in persons with hearing loss.
Wold
D C
DC
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Evans
C R
CR
Montague
J C
JC
Dancer
J E
JE
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006311:Hearing Disorders / Q000150:complications / Q000175:diagnosis*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D010865:Pilot Projects; D013064:Speech Disorders / Q000150:complications / Q000175:diagnosis*; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014059:Tongue / Q000502:physiology*