Influence of vowel environment on duration of consonants produced by normal hearing, hearing impaired, and deaf adult speakers

Abstract

The effect of vowel environment on duration of consonants in the speech of ten normal-hearing, ten moderately to severely hearing-impaired, and ten profoundly deaf adult males was investigated. Each subject uttered five consecutive repetitions of the VCV syllables /isi/, /asa/, /i∫i/, and /a∫a/. The hearing-impaired and deaf subjects congenital hearing losses and were able to intelligibly produce the syllables. Each VCV sample was recorded onto audio tape and then individually played into a visicorder which produced the acoustic wave. Durational differences for /s/ and /∫/ resulting from the two final vowel conditions were examined for each of the three groups. Results indicated that for both the normal-hearing and hearing-impaired groups, there were significantly longer durations of the consonants in the final /i/ environment than in the final /a/ environment. For the deaf subjects, the consonants in the final /a/ environment were significantly longer than in the final /i/ environment.