The Production of Labial Occlusives in Young Hearing-Impaired Children

Abstract

The production of the bilabial consonants /p/, /m/, and /b/ was examined auditorily and spectrographically in the speech production of 24 children (aged 3 to 6) who had severe to profound hearing impairment. The children were recorded imitating the teacher's production of nonsense words containing the bilabial consonants and the vowels /i—a—o/. For all subjects, /b/ was produced correctly in 91% of all tokens, /m/, 77%, and /p/ ( [p^h] ), only 51%. This pattern appears to mirror the development of these sounds in normal-hearing children. The data are described with reference to the auditory-visual perception of the hearing-impaired child and with reference to the order of acquisition of the sounds in normal-hearing children.

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