Aspects of spatio‐temporal variability during consonant production by Greek speakers with hearing impairment

Abstract

This paper investigates spatio‐temporal variability during the production of the lingual consonants /t, k, s, x, n, l, ▒/ by four Greek speakers with profound hearing impairment and with differences in the intelligibility of their speech. It examines important factors that have been documented to influence intelligibility, i.e. durational variability, articulatory (token‐to‐token) variability, and coarticulatory patterns. The technique of electropalatography was used to record tongue‐palate contact patterns during consonant production in order to examine differences in articulatory variability among speakers and in V‐to‐C coarticulatory effects. The study reports durational differences in consonant production between speakers with hearing impairment and normal hearing and investigates the relationship between token‐to‐token variability in tongue‐palate contact patterns and duration. The results indicate a negative relationship between duration and variability, i.e. as segmental duration decreases there is an increase in variability in tongue‐palate contact patterns. Significant speaker‐dependent differences in duration, articulatory variability and coarticulatory patterns are reported and are discussed in relation to differences in intelligibility among the speakers with hearing impairment.

• Hearing impairment
• consonant articulation
• duration
• variability
• coarticulation
• electropalatography
• Greek

Notes

1. Speaker HI4's artificial palate had one electrode less in the first row (i.e. a total of five instead of six electrodes) due to constraints imposed by the anatomy of her dentition. Adjustments were made to relevant data reduction methods to account for the difference in the total number of electrodes.

2. It is worth pointing out that Nicolaidis (2004) presents palatograms displaying frequency of activation over ten repetitions for all consonants at the point of maximum contact. A comparison of the palatograms for each consonant in the two vocalic contexts /a‐a/ vs. /i‐i/ shows clear Vowel‐to‐Consonant coarticulatory effects for most consonants and speakers. Since the point of maximum contact is variable in time within the consonantal interval, an analysis of effects at the temporal midpoint of each consonant is carried out in the current study.