Shari R.Baum
SHCD, McGill Univ., 1266 Pine Ave. W., Montreal, PQ H3G 1A8, Canada
Robin S. Waldstein
CUNY Graduate Ctr., New York, NY 10036
Two experiments investigated the perception of coarticulatory cues in the speech of normally hearing (NH) and profoundly hearing-impaired (HI) children. To examine anticipatory coarticulation, five repetitions of the syllables [si su ti tu ki ku] produced by nine NH and nine HI children were edited to include only the aperiodic consonantal portion. To explore perseveratory coarticulation, comparable segments were excised from the syllables [is us it ut ik uk]. Ten listeners were asked to identify the missing vowel. Results revealed that, for anticipatory coarticulation, listeners were able to identify the absent vowel with better-than-chance accuracy for all stimuli but the HI speakers' [s] tokens. For perseveratory coarticulation, identification accuracy was worse overall, but still significantly above chance for the NH stimuli; for the HI children's productions, only [k] tokens yielded better-than-chance vowel identification. Listener's identification of NH speakers' tokens was significantly better than that of HI speakers' productions for both anticipatory and perseveratory contexts. Results are discussed in relation to the nature of speech production in the HI and the role of contextual cues in speech perception.