Speech Modification by a Deaf Child through Dynamic Orometric Modeling and Feedback

Baseline physiologic, acoustic, and phonetic data are presented to characterize speech production of 3 ½-year-old deaf girl prior to a visual articulatory modeling and feedback program. These observations suggest that she used an articulatory strategy based on visual information about lip and jaw movements rather than tongue positions as a primary means of differentiating speech sounds. The training program which followed used instrumentally generated displays of tongue position and movements to teach production of the /i/ and /a/ vowels in single and bisyllable word contexts. Linguapalatal contact patterns for the consonant /t/ were then introduced and taught in combinations with the vowels. Goal articulatory gestures were learned rapidly with respect to both positional and timing features of speech.