The Effect of Context on the Intelligibility of Hearing and Deaf Children's Speech

Abstract

This study examines the effect of redundancy of information on the intelligibility of hearing and deaf children's speech. Listeners, including those experienced and inexperienced with respect to the speech of the deaf, heard two kinds of stimuli: (1) test words in sentences that varied in the amount of redundant information available, and (2) test words excised from these sentences and presented to the listeners as isolated words. For both groups of children, test words heard in sentences were perceived correctly more often than the same words heard in isolation. However, the effect of redundant information on intelligibility was opposite to that reported for adults (Lieberman, 1963). That is, in the speech of both hearing and deaf children, the scores for test words segmented from sentences with high redundancy were greater than scores for test words segmented from sentences with low redundancy. This suggests that children are not using the same production strategies as adults to assist listeners. The data also do not support the hypothesis that experienced listeners to deaf speech achieve higher intelligibility scores than inexperienced listeners by simply making better use of context.