Daniel S. Beasley

Use of Frequency-Shifted/Time-Compressed Speech with Hearing-Impaired Children

Several electromechanical aids to education for hearing-impaired children have been studied. One method that has received minimal attention is that of frequency-shifted/time-compressed (FS/TC) speech. This study was designed to determine if intelligibility scores on a standard intelligibility measure for children, whereby the words on the test was modified by 35% FS/TC, would show improvement from a pre- to a post-testing session. Nine hearing-impaired children were presented a 0 and 35% FS/TC speech pretest, then trained for 15 days using 35% FS/TC speech signals, and subsequently were presented a 0 and 35% FS/TC speech post-test. A second group of 9 hearing-impaired children were presented similar pre- and post-tests, but were trained under a 0% FS/TC speech condition. The group trained under the 35% FS/TC speech condition showed score gains from the pre- to post-test session, whereas the 0% FS/TC speech group showed essentially no gains from the pre- to the post-test session. The potential application of FS/TC speech to the education of hearing-impaired children were discussed.

Auditory assembly of CVCs by children with normal and defective articulation

Abstract Meaningful and meaningless CVC stimuli were employed in an attempt to determine whether normal children differ from children with articulation disorders in their proficiency at assembling separated phonemes to form whole syllabic units. A total of 120 subjects listened to a tape of 20 CVC units which had been constructed so as to provide inter-phonemic intervals (IPI) of either 100, 200, 300, or 400 msec. The results revealed that all children performed better under the 100 and 200 msec IPI conditions than under the 300 and 400 msec conditions. Meaningful CVC units were synthesized more accurately than meaningless stimuli at all interphonemic interval levels. Also, the normal children performed better on the meaningful stimuli than the misarticulating children, but no significant difference between the two groups was observed for the meaningless stimuli. The results are discussed relative to their applications in speech and language therapy.

Oral stereognosis: Effect of varying form set, answer type, and retention time

The oral stereognosis abilities of 40 young adults were investigated as a function of oral stereognosis form sets (four sets), retention time (unlimited and 5 sec), and response type (oral discrimination and visual recognition). Results showed that the Penn State forms were the easiest for the subjects under all conditions and that the Ringel form set was the most difficult under all conditions. A significant interaction between oral form sets and answer type indicated that the visual recognition task, rather than the discrimination task, was primarily responsible for the differences between the oral form sets. A three-way interaction revealed that the retention times had a significant effect on the two form sets of medium difficulty (NIDR-10 and NIDR-20) for the visual recognition condition. The results are discussed in view of their research and clinical implications.

Children's perception of temporally distorted sentential approximations of varying length.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the abilities of second-grade and fourth-grade children to auditorially process three orders of three- and five-word sentential approximations, which had normal interstimulus intervals (ISI) and ISIs of 200 and 400 ms. Results showed that percent correct scores decreased as a function of increasing sentence length and ISI, and decreasing order of sentential approximation and grade level. The results are discussed relative to theoretical notions of short-term memory and auditory perceptual processing as well as potential clinical applications.