Syllable structure changes and fricative usage in hearing impaired children

This study investigated syllable structure simplification (as evidenced by the presence of final consonant deletion, unstressed syllable deletion, consonant cluster reduction, and reduplication) and fricative usage in nine orally instructed eight to eleven year old hearing-impaired (HI) children. Subjects were assigned to one of three HI groups: moderate, moderately severe, or profound on the basis of pure tone averages (PTA) in the better ear.

Data generated from conversational speech samples and a word elicitation task were used to determine the following: the presence and frequency of syllable structure simplification processes in each subject's speech; the fricative acquisition patterns and fricative error production patterns present in each subject's sentential productions and the difference, if any, between fricative production errors as a function of subject group, syllable shape, segment and/or word-initial vs. word-final position.