ASA 130th Meeting - St. Louis, MO - 1995 Nov 27 .. Dec 01

5aSC14. Temporal characteristics of the speech of a deaf-blind person with a cochlear implant.

Lynn Limbach

Chavi Goodman Soffer

Dept. Speech, Commun. Sci., & Theatre, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, NY 11439

Nancy S. McGarr

Fredericka Bell-Berti

St. John's Univ., Jamaica, NY 11439

Haskins Labs., New Haven, CT 06511

Many of the early studies of the effects of cochlear implants on speech production focused on the speech of persons with profound adventitious hearing loss. More recently, there has been substantial interest in the effects of implants on the speech of persons with congenital hearing loss. This study extends the research in this area to a woman who has been profoundly hearing impaired since birth and sustained a sudden loss of vision in her late teens. She has received extensive speech training, and is also a fluent reader of Braille. For this study, she was recorded reading a passage aloud one month postimplant, and then twice again at three month intervals. During each recording session, she read the six-sentence passage with the implant activated and then with the implant turned off. Analyses of temporal characteristics of each sentence, including relative speech and pause durations and word durations, will be presented. [Work supported by St. John's University and by NIH Grant DC-00121 to the Haskins Laboratories.]