Current state of knowledge: speech recognition and production in children with hearing impairment.

This review summarizes the prevalent literature covering speech recognition and production in children with mild to severe hearing impairment (HI). In general, the ability to recognize and produce speech improves as the child matures but decreases with greater severity of hearing loss. Performance scores on measures of phonetic contrast perception and word recognition are relatively high for children with mild to severe HI when compared to children with profound HI, but not as high as scores for children with normal hearing (NH). Babbling may develop at a slower rate for infants with mild to moderate HI when compared to that of infants with NH. Articulation is not severely affected by mild to severe HI and the most common errors are omissions and substitutions, particularly for fricatives and affricates. Children with mild to severe HI generally produce intelligible speech.