Speech Production of Mandarin-speaking Children with Hearing Impairment and Normal Hearing

This paper studies speech data of 45 children with hearing impairment and 79 children with normal hearing in terms of their speech intelligibility, vowel production, and tone production. Age played an important role in the intelligibility scores and vowel space size of the normally hearing group. In contrast, only the word comprehension ability had a significant effect on the intelligibility scores of the hearing-impaired group. Tone production was examined by means of F0 linearization and automatic k-means clustering. The results suggest that the normally hearing children produced tone shapes with a wider variety, closer to the adults’ results. But differently, the hearing-impaired children with lower speech intelligibility mainly produced high-pitched and extremely monotonous F0 contours.