Development of Phonetic Labeling in Hearing-Impaired Children

The development of labeling ability of an unselected group of 16 severely to profoundly hearing-impaired children was assessed over a period of 4 years, using synthetic speech pattern tests of increasing acoustic complexity. Detailed results are presented for six children matched in pairs in terms of their average pure-tone thresholds. All children showed progress in their ability to label at least some of the contrasts. Development was usually seen for the vowel contrast before the more complex initial consonant voicing contrast. Rate of development was not closely related to average pure-tone thresholds.