A Study of Rate of Speech and Intelligibility of Speech in Hearing impaired Pupils of Baghcheban School of Zahedan, Iran

Hearing loss results in disruption of coordination in muscles and structures engaged in speech timing tasks and consequently acquisition of speech sounds is affected. The purpose of this study is to investigate and compare the speed and intelligibility of speech in hearing impaired and normal hearing Persian speaking elementary school boys and girls. 33 hearing impaired students are randomly selected from three hearing impaired groups (profound, severe and moderately-severe) and compared with 60 normal hearing students. The speed of speech was measured according to reading Words Per Minute (WPM), and speech intelligibility was tested by a 5-rank scale method. As expected, the normal hearing had more speed and intelligibility of speech in contrast to the hearing impaired group. Also hearing impaired boys had a better speed and intelligibility of speech compared to hearing impaired girls but in normal hearing group, girls had better speed. The amount of P-value for moderately-severe and sever hearing impaired was 0.006 and this amount for profound and moderately-severe hearing impaired was 0.002, so p-value is <0.05 and significantly important. Profound hearing impaired group read the text more slowly and had lower speech intelligibility than other two hearing impaired groups.