| The development of intelligible speech in severe and profoundly deaf children has been largely unsuccessful regardless of the type of educational setting or teaching approach used. One of the problems is that current approaches to teaching speech to the deaf have no well developed theory of speech, especially with reference to prosody, by which to effectively describe the nature of deaf speech, on one hand, or to provide a basis for intervention strategies, on the other.; Traditional approaches to speech development in deaf children only address pieces of the overall speech process. Consequently, if greater success in the mastery of speech is to be expected, it is imperative that curricula be based on a model or models that account for a greater range of linguistic issues. Current approaches to speech development for deaf children are not adequate and they cannot merely be patched up.; Several models of intonation are investigated in terms of their presuppositions and their implications for adequately accounting for issues in deaf speech as well as their potential as a basis for useful teaching strategies. The speech of deaf and hearing readers is analyzed in the light of these models.; The role of higher level cognitive and linguistic planning is seen as being critical in the speech process and that if there is difficulty at this level, speech problems can be expected. It is shown that problems are evident in the cognitive and linguistic preplanning of deaf speakers and this weakness is reflected in poor timing control and an erratic or neutralized intonation contour. The role of intonation in the acquisition of language in young children suggests that there are some linguistic experiences such as nursery rhymes which may facilitate the automatization of timing in phonology. As deaf children usually have a restricted linguistic experience, especially in the area of "nonmeaningful" language, the utilization of richer curricula designs than are currently available--curricula that include a range of interactive language experiences available to hearing children for the development of language, is critical. |
