Acoustic analysis of the speech of an Australian English-speaking child with hearing aids

Children with hearing loss often have problems producing adult-like consonants. This study acoustically examined the speech of a monolingual Australian English speaking 5-year-old child with bilateral severe hearing loss who uses hearing aids. The aim was to explore whether there were any systematic errors in the child's speech that may not be perceptually available to the listener. The analysis examined the acoustic cues to onset and coda segments. The results suggest that the child is making systematic errors of voicing, onset consonant place of articulation substitutions and coda consonant omissions. These findings begin to provide a baseline for designing a more controlled experimental study to explore the nature of segmental problems with the goal of designing better therapeutic interventions.