Hanne Kloots

Can listeners hear the difference between children with normal hearing and children with a hearing impairment

ABSTRACT Acoustic measurements have shown that the speech of hearing-impaired (HI) children differs from that of normally hearing (NH) children, even after several years of device use. This study focuses on the perception of HI speech in comparison to NH children’s speech. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether adult listeners can identify the speech of NH and HI children. Moreover, it is studied whether listeners’ experience and the children’s length of device use play a role in that assessment. For this study, short utterances of 7 children with a cochlear implant (CI), 7 children with an acoustic hearing aid (HA) and 7 children with NH were presented to 90 listeners who were required to specify the hearing status of each speech sample. The judges had different degrees of familiarity with hearing disorders: there were 30 audiologists, 30 primary schoolteachers and 30 inexperienced listeners. The results show that the speech of children with NH and HI can reliably be identified. However, listeners do not manage to distinguish between children with CI and HA. Children with CI are increasingly identified as NH with increasing length of device use. For children with HA, there is no similar change with longer device use. Also, experienced listeners seem to display a more lenient attitude towards atypical speech, whereas inexperienced listeners are stricter and generally consider more utterances to be produced by children with HI.

Nationale variatie in het vreemdetalenonderwijs : een tool voor intratalige leerganganalyse

National variation in foreign language teaching: a tool for intra-linguistic

Waarom dromedarissen maar één 'm' hebben

This contribution focuses on the spelling of single consonants after a vowel without primary stress — and therefore a short duration — in polysyllabic Dutch words, e.g. kanaal (‘canal’) and dromedaris (‘dromedary’). The single consonant can be explained on the basis of the (Dutch-oriented) standard pronunciation with tense vowels like [a] or [o], but it can also be related to the (mostly Romance) etymology of the words. Only a few textbooks on Dutch spelling go into this matter. All of them are Flemish, possibly because Flemings pronounce and perceive vowels in open syllables without primary stress more frequently as lax (e.g., [ɑ], [ɔ]). For some words, however, the etymology is ignored and the spelling may have been adapted to the pronunciation, e.g. double 〈f〉 after the first vowel of saffraan ( safran – ‘saffron’) and single 〈n〉 after 〈o〉 in stationeren ( stationner – ‘to park’). Although this explanation seems plausible, it raises new questions as well. For example, words like kaproen (= type of headwear), patroon (‘pattern’) and Afrikaan (‘African’) also have an [ɑ]-like pronunciation (similar to saffraan ), but unlike saffraan these words do not have a double consonant. Interestingly, for words like stationeren — that contain 〈io〉 + [n] + full vowel — the spelling appears to have changed since the end of the 19th century. De Vries and Te Winkel (1898) still wrote stationneeren (with 〈nn〉). To get more grip on our topic, a thorough study of the Dutch vocabulary is needed, since at the moment, it is unknown for which Dutch words the etymologically motivated spelling is replaced by a more phonetic one. This additional study will, for example, show which category is the most frequent one: the saffraan -type (where the consonant has been doubled) or the stationeren -type (where a double consonant has been replaced by a single one).