| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立台北護理學院 === 聽語障礙科學研究所 === 94 === The breath group has been commonly used for the clinical assessment of speech production. The loci of inspiration in continuous speech are generally determined by perceptual judgments by clinicians or researchers. Although the reliability of perceptually-based breath group determination has been reported to be satisfactory, the validity of perceptual analysis has not been established. Previous studies on speech breathing problems in the hearing impaired population have mostly focused on the physiological aspects. Little is known about the breath group (BG) structure of speakers with hearing impairment (HI). The purposes of this study are to examine the reliability and validity of perceptually determined inspiratory loci and to analyze the temporal BG structure of speakers with HI.
Participants consisted of 20 speakers with severe to profound prelingual HI and 20 speakers without hearing loss as control group, matched for gender, age, and educational background. While wearing a circumferentially vented mask connected to a pneumotach (AP-II), the participants read three short passages. Airflow signals were used to locate inspiratory loci during each speech sample. Three judges determined the inspiratory loci perceptually. Reliability was calculated as the agreement between at least two out of three judges. The real inspiratory loci identified by AP-II were compared with the results of perceptually determined inspiratory loci to obtain validity. The temporal parameters of BG structure were then used to perform group comparisons.
Result showed that the reliability and validity of BG determination were satisfactory. The HI group had significantly more inappropriate inspiratory loci, longer inter-BG pause, non-inspiratory pause in inter-BG pause, and smaller proportion of speech and number of syllables within BGs than the control group. Somewhat unexpected, the group differences of inspiratory duration, expiratory duration, and BG duration were not found.
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