Teaching intonation to deaf persons through visual displays

The broken auditory feedback loop of a deaf person inhibits the monitoring of his or her speech. This, in turn, frequently creates deficiencies in the segmental and suprasegmental aspects of speech. The incorrect suprasegmental aspects of speech, for example, often involve the generation of inappropriate intonation contours. The deaf person'si ntonation can be improved by means of sensory aids that display the pitch of speech.This paper is concemed with the development of a visual intonation-display system for the teaching of intonation to the deaf. In contrast to other visual intonation-display systems, the visual feedback of intonation is given as a continuous representation of the pitch contour. This contour contains the perceptually relevant aspects of the inlonation pattern and the display of vowel onsets. The reliability of tbe visual intonation-display system is tested and discussed and applications of the syslem for the teaching of inlonation lo the deaf are described.