14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Comparison of the Duration of Phones and Words in the Speech of Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Individuals

Nina Alarotu, Mietta Lennes

University of Helsinki, Finland

The aim of this study was to confirm previously reported differences in the durations of phones and words spoken by normal-hearing and hearing-impaired individuals. For this purpose, utterances of 400 isolated Finnish words were recorded from eight hearing-impaired and four normal-hearing adult subjects. The utterances were manually labeled by two phoneticians and collected into a searchable speech database. Durations of phones and words were measured for each subject. The mean durations of both words (N=4800) and phones (N=27478) were longer for the hearing-impaired subject group. The two groups differed significantly regarding the durations of the words and phones. The results are important regarding both speech recognition technology and clinical methods.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Alarotu, Nina / Lennes, Mietta (1999): "Comparison of the duration of phones and words in the speech of normal-hearing and hearing-impaired individuals", In ICPhS-14, 775-778.