Vowel perception and hearing impairment

The perception of vowels by young hearing-impaired and normal-hearing children was investigated in two experimental versions, one which required the child ~o make discriminations among minimal pairs, the other which was based on free choice. Each version focused on three lists which comprised monosyllabic real word-pairs whose initial and final consonants were identical. These lists were constructed around high and low frequency components of vowel spectra in order to explore those acoustic aspects which have been hypothesized (Ling, 1978) as being maximally problematic in high-frequency hearing loss. Results indicated that the normal-hearing children, in contrast to the hearing-impaired, made virtually no errors in either task. The hearing-impaired children made significantly more errors in the free-choice task and in the lists whose vowels contained the highest frequency spectra and among those word-pairs which commenced with nonstops.....198