Temporal characteristics of speech in patients with moderately severe chronic postlingual sensorineural hearing loss without the use of hearing aids and with hearing prosthetics

Postlingually deaf patients, unlike those who lost their hearing at an early age, retain previously formed control based on a direct connection between hearing and speech. At the same time, patients with hearing impairment show changes in the speech production compared to those who hear normally, which are caused by a deterioration in the feedback of auditory communication. To what extent the auditory control that is impaired in sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) can be compensated for with hearing aids remains a little-studied question. A study of the effect of restored auditory control on articulatory motor skills with adequate hearing aids has been conducted. A comparison of the durations of stressed vowels and individual words in speech uttered with and without a hearing aid was performed in 12 speakers (6 of them men) with moderately severe chronic SNHL. For stressed vowels [a], [i], [u], which make up the vertices of the vowel triangle for the Russian language, in all positions – the beginning, middle and end of the word, a significant decrease in their duration was revealed when wearing hearing aids compared to speaking without them. In most cases, the duration of stressed vowels varied by about 10%, and the duration of individual words containing such vowels by 5%. A decrease in the duration of stressed vowels and individual words can be an objective indicator for evaluating the effectiveness of auditory prosthetics to restore auditory feedback and normalize speech motor skills.