Therapeutic Implications of Voiced Sounds in Children with Communication Needs

Abstract

Children with hearing impairments, who do not receive auditory feedback eventually develop speech impairments. Children with hearing impairments lack the ability to talk even by having normal speech production mechanisms. The hearing-impaired child's articulation, accuracy, stress, and intonation patterns are all impacted even if he/she attempts to speak by visualizing lip movements because they are unable to distinguish vowels and consonants with tongue movement concealed in the mouth, nor they are able to understand variations in pitch or intensity of speech. Individuals with hearing impairments may receive auditory, tactile, or visual input, contingent on the degree of their disability. This research is dedicated for developing preliminary systems for teaching. These systems can be created using feedback of articulatory parameters or feedback of acoustic parameters, such as fundamental frequency, speech intensity, and spectral features. Data from speech language pathologists were collected from 20 children with and without speech impairments, aged 5 to 8 using picture naming tasks. The statistical analysis on voiced samples /pha/, /mha/, /tha/ relived the significant variation between children with and without hearing impairments.