A Pilot Study of SPINE Test Scores and Measures of Tongue Deviancy in Speakers with Severe-to-Profound Hearing Loss

Two developments show promise in the assessment and remediation of defective speech production in persons with hearing loss. A perceptual speech-intelligibility test, the SPINE (for Speech Intelligibility Evaluation), is a simple, clinician-administered instrument which is valid, reliable, and clinically efficient. In addition, the development of acoustic measures of tongue deviancy, computed from formant frequencies, makes possible a direct lateral visualization of tongue placement in relation to standard vowel placement. In this study, SPINE test scores of 28 persons with severe-to-profound hearing loss were correlated with two measures of tongue deviancy during production of the vowels \i\, \a\, and \u\. For both measures of tongue deviancy, correlations with the SPINE were significant for the three vowels combined and for the isolated vowel \i\. These findings suggest that clinicians may ultimately have two different but complementary means of assessing speech production in persons with hearing loss.