Phonetics curriculum development and implementation for the deaf university student.

Previous research has demonstrated that intraoral air pressures associated with stop consonants vary as a function of the contextual environment of the consonant (initial, medial, or final syllable position). In the present study, the effect of adjacent phonemes on the intraoral air pressures for the stop consonants /p/, /b/, /t/, and /d/ was investigated. Recordings of peak intraoral air pressures were obtained from five subjects for each of the four stop consonants in the environment of high front vowels, low front vowels, high back vowels, low back vowels, and other consonants. Highest intraoral air pressures were associated with the stop consonants in the consonant environment; the next highest pressures were associated with the high vowel environment while the lowest pressures occurred in the low vowel environment. No differences in intraoral pressures for the four stop consonants were observed in comparison of the front and back vowel environments. These findings can be interpreted as reflecting a co-articulation effect and thereby demonstrate that phonetic environment does affect the magnitude of the intraoral air pressures associated with stop consonants. The data from the present study also support the trend reported in previous studies for higher intraoral pressures to be associated with voiceless consonants.

This article examines both the front and back shifts of the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) in a rural Kentuckiana (south-central Indiana) community through 50 years of real time, from the middle of the twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. Euclidean distance measurements between the pair of high front vowels /i/ and /I/ and between the pair of mid front vowels /e/ and /ε/ are subjected to analyses of variance (ANOVAs). The mid front vowels are found to be involved in the SVS and increasingly so through real time; the high front vowels, in contrast, not only are not participating in the SVS but have exhibited movements in non-SVS directions. Fronting of the back vowels is analyzed through linear mixed-effects regression analyses. Except for /℧/, which remains stable over time in this community, the other back vowels, /u/, /o/, and the nucleus of the /a℧/ diphthong all show real-time changes that are consistent with the SVS. Some of the real-time developments are at odds with profiles of change through apparent time, which underscores the value of real-time data when and where it is available.

Reading achievement among deaf students typically lags significantly behind hearing peers, a situation that has changed little despite decades of research. This lack of progress and recent findings indicating that deaf students face many of the same challenges in comprehending sign language as they do in comprehending text suggest that difficulties frequently observed in their learning from text may involve more than just reading. Two experiments examined college students' learning of material from science texts. Passages were presented to deaf (signing) students in print or American Sign Language and to hearing students in print or auditorially. Several measures of learning indicated that the deaf students learned as much or more from print as they did from sign language, but less than hearing students in both cases. These and other results suggest that challenges to deaf students' reading comprehension may be more complex than is generally assumed.

This study examined the relative distances among English front vowels in a message produced by 47 Korean and American speakers from an internet speech archive in order to provide better pronunciation skills for Korean English learners. The Euclidean distances in the vowel space of F1 and F2 were measured among the front vowel pairs. The first vowel pair [i-ɛ] was set as the reference from which the relative distances of the other two vowel pairs were measured in percent in order to compare the vowel sounds among speakers of different vocal tract lengths. Results show that F1 values of the front vowels produced by the Korean and American speakers increased from the high front vowel to the low front vowel with differences among the groups. The Korean speakers generally produced the front vowels with smaller jaw openings than the American speakers did. Second, the relative distance of the high front vowel pair [i-ɪ] showed a significant difference between the Korean and American speakers while that of the low front vowel pair [ɛ-æ] showed a non-significant difference. Finally, the Korean speakers in the higher proficiency level produced the front vowels with higher F1 values than those in the lower proficiency level.

The ability to organize the referential content of narrative has usually been investigated as a mark of the development of discourse skills. In this study, the pragmatic use of pronominal and nominal forms of reference in written stories was considered instead as a mark of literacy development in deaf and hearing students. Participants in the study were 17 deaf high-school students, 17 school-age matched hearing controls, and 16 hearing second-graders (novice writers) who were asked to write a picture-story, Frog, Where are you?, for a hearing reader who was unacquainted with it. Results revealed that deaf students appear to use the same variety of referential devices as hearing students when writing and, in most cases, these devices are used appropriately. However, the referential strategies of the deaf students were more nominal and less anaphoric than those of their hearing peers. It is concluded that the referential strategies of deaf writers are only superficially similar to those of hearing novice writers, suggesting that deaf students' referential strategies in writing are not merely the product of a delay in development of discourse skills.

Previous research by speech scientists on the acoustic characteristics of American English vowel systems has typically focused on a single regional variety, despite decades of sociolinguistic research demonstrating the extent of regional phonological variation in the United States. In the present study, acoustic measures of duration and first and second formant frequencies were obtained from five repetitions of 11 different vowels produced by 48 talkers representing both genders and six regional varieties of American English. Results revealed consistent variation due to region of origin, particularly with respect to the production of low vowels and high back vowels. The Northern talkers produced shifted low vowels consistent with the Northern Cities Chain Shift, the Southern talkers produced fronted back vowels consistent with the Southern Vowel Shift, and the New England, Midland, and Western talkers produced the low back vowel merger. These findings indicate that the vowel systems of American English are better characterized in terms of the region of origin of the talkers than in terms of a single set of idealized acoustic-phonetic baselines of "General" American English and provide benchmark data for six regional varieties.

This article investigates the effects of gender on two emphatic sounds, namely [sˤ] and [tˤ], in Ajlouni-Jordanian Arabic, a sub-dialect of Rural Jordanian Arabic. The study was mainly motivated by the relatively small literature on the bearing(s) of gender on emphasis production in Jordanian Arabic in general and in Ajlouni Jordanian Arabic specifically. To do so, the effects gender has on emphasis productions in this dialect were tested in mono- and bi-syllabic words, with the emphatic sounds occurring both word-initially and word-finally. The vowel qualities which were incorporated in the stimuli of this study include the long low-back vowel [a:], the short low-back vowel [a], the long high-front vowel [i:], the short mid-high front vowel [ɪ], the long high-back vowel [u:] and the short mid-high back vowel [ʊ]. The sample of this study consisted of 12 native speakers of Ajlouni-Jordanian Arabic, with each speaker producing 48 minimal pairs. The acoustic measurements that were carried out on the data are consonant duration (CD), Voice Onset Time (VOT), and the vowel first three formant frequencies (F1, F2, and F3). The study showed that, relative to gender, only VOT was a reliable acoustic correlate of emphasis where CD, on the one hand, and F1, F2, and F3 in both the target and non-target syllables, on the other hand, showed no significance.

Some 53 deaf and 33 hearing college students observed a videotaped lecture followed by a 15-minute period of reviewing prepared class notes. Two days later half of each group again reviewed the notes before taking a test measuring learning outcomes in four areas: (a) recall, (b) recognition, (c) concept acquisition, and (d) problem solving. Multivariate analysis of variance showed that repeated review was much more helpful to deaf students than to hearing students on the recall and recognition measures, but not on the higher level learning outcomes. It was further shown that hearing students outperformed deaf students on each of the four dependent measures. It was concluded that repeated review is more beneficial to deaf than to hearing students and that it selectively affects memory tasks (recall, recognition) more than tasks requiring higher level processing (concept acquisition, problem solving).

Hearing loss can be a major detriment to academic achievement among students. The present comparative study examines the differences in mathematics motivation, anxiety, and performance in female students with hearing loss and their hearing peers. A total of 63 female students with hearing loss (deaf and hard-of-hearing) and 63 hearing female students were selected to participate in the study. The two groups of students were matched in terms of the city of residence, academic year, academic grade, and age. The Mathematics Motivation Scale and the Mathematics Anxiety Survey were used for data collection. The students’ mathematics scores in the first and second semesters of school were used as indicators of their mathematics performance. The data obtained were analyzed using the MANOVA. The results of the study showed a higher intrinsic goal orientation in both hard-of-hearing and hearing students than in the deaf students; extrinsic goal orientation was higher in the deaf and hard-of-hearing students than in the hearing students; and task value, control belief, and mathematics self-efficacy were lower in the deaf and hard-of-hearing students than in the hearing students. The findings of the study also showed that mathematics test anxiety and mathematics anxiety were higher in the hard-of-hearing and deaf students than in their hearing peers. Moreover, mathematics performance was higher in the hearing students than in their deaf and hard-of-hearing peers.

A self-concept measure was administered to a group of 68 deaf students aged 8-19 years and a comparison group of 68 hearing students. Teachers for both of the groups completed observer reports of self-concept. Although tentative, the findings indicate that hearing teachers' perceptions of students' self-concepts are in closer agreement for hearing students than they are for deaf students. At the same time, the results show that deaf students do not appear markedly different from hearing students in their own reports of self-concept.

ON NOVEMBER 15 TO 16, 2002, the Gallaudet Research Institute (GRI) sponsored the national conference Stakes Testing: Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children Being Left Behind? held at the Gallaudet University Kellogg Conference Center. Three hundred people from forty-two states participated, including teachers and counselors of deaf students, school administrators, teacher educators, experts on educational testing, educational researchers, test designers, members of deaf advocacy associations, parents of deaf children, and representatives of various governmental agencies. The conference was a major event featuring introductory remarks by Gallaudet President I. King Jordan and Stephanie Lee, the director of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs, a keynote address by James Popham, author of The Truth About Testing: An Educator's Call to Action and many books on and evaluation, and presentations by other nationally known experts on and testing-related issues, including Jay Heubert, co-editor of the National Research Council's High Stakes: Testing for Tracking, Promotion, and Graduation, Carolyn Massad, the national consultant for English language arts at Harcourt Educational Measurement, Neal Kingston, the senior vice president and chief operating officer of Measured Progress, Martha Thurlow, director of the National Center on Educational Outcomes, and Shalia Cowan, director of the Texas Education Agency's Division of Services for the Deaf. Also featured were many presentations from the front lines by educators of deaf and hard of hearing students. GRI director and conference co-chair Michael Karchmer said at the opening of the conference that presenters had been selected to represent a broad range of opinion. He predicted that all in attendance would have much to learn and that consensus was unlikely. He advised attendees to keep their minds open as they weighed one perspective against another and to be prepared to change their minds. The scope of the conference presentations was too broad to summarize adequately in a brief article. This essay, therefore, pursues a limited range of important recurring themes of the conference. Testing and Deaf Students' Difficulties with English Midway through a series of panel presentations by educators of deaf students on the first day of the conference, Michael (Mickey) Jones, director of the Evaluation Center at the Illinois School for the Deaf, told a story that evoked many nods of recognition. In 1992, he said, he'd participated in a task force set up in Illinois to make decisions about the appropriateness of the Illinois Goal Assessment Program (IGAP) for use with special education students. His role had been to examine the test, then inform the task force about difficulties deaf and hard of hearing students might have taking it. He had told the task force that deafness can have a severe impact on reading and writing ability and that results on the IGAP-a challenging paper and pencil test-might misrepresent the true capabilities of most deaf students. To illustrate, he had described a bright fifteen-year-old deaf boy whose performance IQ was 133 and whose math computation skills were above grade level. The boy was fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and could demonstrate a broad range of knowledge in ASL. On standardized tests, however, his reading level had been measured at six grades below the average for his hearing peers. After seeing a sample of this boy's writing, the task force had decided that deaf students in Illinois should be waived from taking the IGAP. But that was 1992, ten years before the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) was signed into law. Everyone in Jones's audience got the point: Things are different now. stakes testing is about to become a reality for deaf as well as hearing students in a growing number of states across the country. In the near future failing these tests will have serious consequences in state after state. …

Deaf students’ hearing problem results in their mastery of language and mathematics lower than hearing students. Learning the topic of rounding is difficult for deaf students because it requires a good understanding of language and a true perception in math concepts, in which are abstract in nature. Learning concepts needs a special strategy for this type of students, as generally mathematics is difficult to be translated and communicated by sign language. This specificity forces them to possess unique behavior in understanding everything through visual power. This paper discusses a study of the creation of a book and smartphone applications as devices based on augmented-reality (AR) software on the topic of rounding accompanied by rich visualization to facilitate deaf students in achieving mathematical basic competencies. This study aims to describe and reveal the validity and the effectiveness of the designed devices through their implementation in a classroom. The research and development method refer to ADDIE which consisting of five stages, namely: analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. The results of this study show that the AR-Book and the AR-Smartphone application are valid used by deaf students and both devices are effective in achieving their mathematical basic competencies.

This research aims at analyzing the practices of linguistic interactions between deaf and hearing students in a regular school in the city of Santarém-PA, western region of Pará. It was based on the historical-cultural, which includes the individual as a being produced historically in its relation to culture. For data collection, interviews were conducted with a semistructured script with 8 regular teachers and 1 teacher from the Specialized Educational Service (AEE). Data were analyzed through the following categories: 1) Teacher training to work with deaf students; 2) Conception of Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS); 3) Linguistic interaction practices with deaf students 4) Conception of the role / partnership between resource center teachers and regular teachers in the education of the deaf and 5) Evaluation of inclusion of the deaf in regular education. With the analysis of the data it was noticed that most of the teachers do not have specific training to work with the deaf student, except for the ESA teacher; teachers are clear about the importance of Libras as an important instrument for the interaction and learning of the deaf, although they do not understand it well as a natural language; about 7 among the 9 teachers interviewed have difficulties regarding interactions with their deaf students through LIBRAS; positive despite the difficulties. It is concluded that the inclusion of the deaf in the analyzed school must overcome the level of socialization and advance to the development of meaningful learning of deaf individuals.

Comparing congenitally deaf children with hearing children on a variety of information processing tasks provides a natural test of the developmental consequences accompanying the long term loss of a particular sensory input. In this experiment, two sequential and two spatial tasks were used to evaluate the way deaf and hearing individuals process these different types of information. When deaf students were asked to recall the order of a string of lights, they performed as well as hearing students. Deaf students were at a significant disadvantage, however, when processing sequentially presented digits. Deaf students performed as well as hearing students on two complex, standardized spatial tasks. The loss of a major sensory modality had minimal effect on three of the four tasks investigated in the present study. Explanations for the single task with a performance differential are considered.

Two experiments examined the problem-solving strategies of deaf and hearing students from seven years to college age in the context of the ‘Twenty Questions’ game. Overall, deaf children were significantly less likely than hearing peers to ‘win’ the game within Twenty Questions, and problem-solving appeared less efficient and less cognitively sophisticated among deaf than hearing students at all ages. Deaf and hearing children who had played the game before were equally likely to use winning strategies. However, inexperienced hearing children typically discovered the ‘correct’ strategy, whereas inexperienced deaf peers did not. Reflectivity–impulsivity, as measured by the Porteus Mazes Test (Experiment 1), was unrelated to problem-solving performance in children and revealed no effects of hearing status. Possible causes and implications of the observed effects are discussed as they relate to early experiences of deaf children and their lack of early, effective access to language.