Oral diadochokinesis in hearing-impaired adolescents.

Oscillographic tracings for time-by-count measures of diadochokinetic syllable rate (Fletcher, 1972) were collected from a group of 30 hearing-impaired and five normal-hearing high-school students. Results indicated that hearing-impaired subjects performed significantly slower on all speech-timing tasks than their normal-hearing peers. Within-group differences were identified for the hearing-impaired subjects with respect to speech intelligibility, degree of hearing loss, and gender. The differences, in general, indicate that for varying degrees of hearing loss severity there are speech-timing coordination deficits commensurate to that level.