A Preliminary Study Of Mandarin Intonation Produced By Hearing Impaired Children

Adopting the methods from experimental phonetics, this thesis tries to make an exploratory comparative analysis between hearing impaired (HI) children who had taken speech rehabilitation courses for over 9 years and their age matched normal peers on the intonation production of the Mandarin Chinese. The experiment contains two parts, namely the acoustic analysis of intonation production and speech perception analysis. Six HI children whose hearing impaired level are ranging from severe to profound from the Urumqi Special Training Schools for Deaf and six normal children from the Attached Middle School of XJNU were participated in the intonation production experiment while 30 normal postgraduate Han students from XJNU were participated in the speech perception experiment. The main research questions are: 1) Can the hearing impaired subjects articulate the MC declarative sentence in a F0 decline intonation and interrogative sentence a F0 raising intonation? 2). Which intonation contour, the declarative one or the interrogative one, is better acquired by those hearing impaired children? 3). Can different tones in the sentence final position affect the intonation contour that produced by the hearing impaired subjects?This experiment applied Praat as the main speech analysis software and Excel as well as SPSS as the main statistical software. The results of the experiment shows: both the declarative sentence and the interrogative sentence are not well acquired by those HI children, and it is especially true for the interrogative type cause these sentences lacks an overall higher pitch range if compared with the peer group's. The tone produced by HI children in a sentence may be further twisted as the intonation value added on the F0. The general duration trend of the HI speakers is that the average duration of the HI speakers is longer than their normal pairs. There are no direct link for HI speakers' badly acquired tone and intonation, but there may be a link on relatively better acquired tone and intonation. For the better acquired tone four may have some impact on the general intonation identification.This experiment is a preliminary research on the acoustic description of MC intonation acquired by HI children within the context of hearing pathological conditions, and it may provide some insights for speech therapy teachers as well as those hearing aid makers. In the speech rehabilitation course, the teachers should pay more attention to the intonation production, especially the intonation of the interrogative sentences. For those hearing aid makers, this experiment may provide some food for thought as there may be a need to upgrade their conventional product which can only amplify the sound intensity to each customer-designed hearing aid which also emphasis the information on the distinction of F0. This experiment provides some scientific data for the research of language acquisition under the background of pathological linguistics.