ORAL COMMUNICATION-SKILLS OF CHILDREN WHO ARE HARD-OF-HEARING

Forty children with mild to severe hearing losses were administered a battery of speech and language tasks. The children's speech was charac terized by misarticulation of affricates and fricatives, mild-moderate hoarseness, mild resonance problems, and good intelligibility. Their language samples included syntactic errors, primarily involving the us e of bound morphemes and complex sentence structures. The children's p ragmatic errors consisted primarily of providing inadequate or ambiguo us information to the listener. These results indicate a consistent pa ttern of oral communication behavior that reflects the reduction of ac oustic input that they experience.