Increasing the intelligibility of hearing impaired children’s speech

Abstract

The intelligibility of speech depends on the correct use of the language sound (phonemes) in words and sentences and appropriate patterns of prosody and voice. It could be estimated through percentiles of words, sentences or ideas understood by hearing people. This paper refers to a study realized in order to find out the possibility of increasing the speech intelligibility of hearing-impaired pubescents. Generally, in the speech therapeutic and school programs for hearing impaired children, one looks for the language development, without emphasizing the speech training, which, after of all, exteriorizes the language. Therefore, frequently auditory handicapped people are not understood although having oral language for communication because of the little language intelligibility. The results of the speech training program with five hearing-impaired pupils aged 10 and 11 years show that even at this age it is possible to succeed in significative increasing of speech intelligibility when well defined and controlled training programs are realized including the paticipation of many people dealing with the pupils for many hours a day. Thus, the results cannot be ascribed to isolate agent but they are due to the following aspects rational thecnics guiding to the fortifying of proprioceptive and visual feed-backs and articulatory motor pattern more fluent and natural constant motivation of therapists, teachers, parents and pupils.