Intonation perception in hearing-impaired children

The speech of hearing-impaired persons, especially those with prelingual impairment, exhibits observable disorders of perception and realization of prosodic features and phenomena. The disorders particularly affect the perception of basic frequency of speech signals, changes of which (frequency) form intonation structures, contribute as the main factors to forming phrasal stress, and play a significant role in coding the emotional marking of prosodic structures. The primary causes of the foregoing irregularities are the impaired auditory control of utterances of the surrounding people resulting in the inability to fully use the proper patterns of prosodic structures, and impaired auditory self-control. The article presents the results of the author’s studies on intonation perception by six-to-eleven-year-old children with prelingual hearing impairment, with moderate, severe and profound hearing loss, as well as children with perilingual hearing impairment, with mild, moderate, and severe hearing loss. The obtained results confirmed the influence of early-onset prelingual hearing loss on the occurrence of severe disorders in the development of perception of intonation structures.