Speech Intelligibility of a Seven-Year-Old Girl with Severe Congenital Hypoplasia of the Tongue

Abstract

Weinberg and associates (1]) recently used cineradiologic and photo— graphic techniques to describe compensatory speech articulation patterns of a seven—year-old girl with severe, congenital hypoplasia of the tongue. In that report, it was stated that the young aglossic talker had readily intelligible speech, a conclusion that was based solely on the informal observations of experienced clinicians. The present report describes an experiment designed to evaluate the speech intelligibility of this aglossic talker in more formal terms. Methods The aglossic talker recorded the 300 words used to form the six 50-item word lists of the rhyme test described by House and as— sociates (5). The words were recorded without instrumental monitoring, with the patient instructed to maintain a constant level of vocal effort. Since the talker was not experienced in recording speech materials for analysis or related uses, her success in following instructions was investigated. Accordingly, the recorded words were played into a Bruel and Kjaer graphic level recorder (lVIodel 2305), and the level of the vocalic maxima of each word was measured relative to a IOOO-Hz reference signal. Within each 50-w0rd list, the range of level for vocalic maxima was about 6 to 8dB, a range not much greater than that usually found for vowels produced by normal talkers (2). The average level of the six test lists varied only about 3dB, and consequently the recordings were not adjusted for level variations. The word lists were presented to 18 listeners under earphones through high—quality listening equipment. The average level of the speech was about 80dB SPL measured under the headphones. The authors are affiliated with the