Phonetic discrimination of Persian vowels in children with severe hearing loss

Background and Aim: Hearing-impairment leads to problems in language perception which in turn results in difficulties in language production. The present study investigated hearing-impaired children's ability to discriminate Persian vowels. It aimed to describe the extent to which children have difficulty comprehending and discriminating phonetic features of vowels.Methods: To fulfill this aim, a researcher-made test, which was based on the Auditory Perception Test 2001, investigated the phonetic discrimination of vowels in Persian-speaking and hearing-impaired children aged five to eight years. The test has two sections, auditory-visual and just auditory discrimination of vowels, which included five subtests assessing discrimination of front and back vowels. Through this test, the phonetic discrimination ability of 22 hearing-impaired children was evaluated. The gathered data were analyzed using matched t-test and repeated measures ANOVA.Results: The findings showed that there is a significant difference between correct responses to the sections on front and back vowels (p