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Oral-Only and Simultaneous Communication Speech Characteristics of Teachers of the Deaf Merv Hyde, Des Power, and Greg Leigh 9 DESPITE THE widespread adoption of the total communication philosophy and its most frequent application in simultaneous communication, concerns have emerged about the relative effectiveness of its practices from both receptive and productive perspectives. Critics of its use have attacked it for its ineffectiveness in achieving its avowed purposes (Johnson, Liddell, and Erting 1989), for its lack of emphasis on oral-aural components of communication (Huntington and Watton 1986; Ross and Calvert 1984), and because it presents teachers with an "impossible task" (Strong and Charlson 1987) in which they are not able to maintain a high level of correspondence between their spoken and signed outputs (Kluwin 1981; Marmor and Pettito 1979). The early studies examining the correspondence between teachers' spoken and signed communication have, however, been criticized on methodological grounds; more recent and better-designed studies of teachers' ability to produce signed English in simultaneous communication have presented a different picture. They indicate that well-motivated and experienced teachers can and do produce high levels of correspondence between the spoken and signed components of their simultaneous communication (average of over 90 percent correspondence) in classrooms (Hyde and Power 1991; Mayer and Lowenbraun 1990). Yet, recent research by two of the authors of this chapter has raised questions about the quality of teachers' speech when using simultaneous communication (Hyde and Power 1991). In particular, it is likely that there are disturbances of the prosodic qualities of the teacher's speech that may influence the acceptability of such speech as an auditory-oral model for deaf students. To date, consideration of the prosodic qualities of teacher speech produced in conjunction with signed English has been mainly limited to the examination of teachers' rate of utterance when using simultaneous communication (Hyde and Power 1991). Results of these examinations indicate that, for sentence material, teachers' rates of utterance do slow down in simultaneous communication, with signed English sentences presented at approximately half the rate (2.5 sylllsec) reported for sentences presented with 117 118 MERV HYDE, DES POWER, AND GREG LEIGH speech only (4.8 syll/sec). Further, the same study provided evidence that, because of simultaneous signed English production demands, there was vowel elongation, repetition of consonants (e.g., "stop-ping" instead. of "stopping," as a consequence of slowed speech when adding the fingerspelled morpheme), and, at the word and sentence levels, some changes from teachers' normal stress and emphasis patterns. What is not yet known is whether these changes to teacher speech also occur under oral-only communication with deaf students and, crucially whether or not these changes under either condition hamper or facilitate deaf students' comprehension of information through residual hearing and lipreading. It may be, for example, that "unnatural" speech variations (from the perspective of both "conversational" and "formal" rate descriptions [Pickett 1980, 166]) under oral or simultaneous communication conditions facilitate rather than limit deaf students' comprehension. This was found to IJe the case with deafened adults exposed to "clear" speech incorporating some of the changes noted above as occurring in simultaneous communication (Picheny; Durlach, and Braida 1985, 1986). The three author-researchers of the present study; therefore, sought to examine a number of prosodic features of teachers' speech, including rate of utterance, intrasentence pause duration, intersentence pause duration, and the "understandability" and "naturalness" of the teachers' speech under the oral-only and simultaneous communication conditions to deaf adult listeners . This approach, it was hoped, would lead to a better understanding of the features of teacher speech with various communication methods and the implications that variations might have for the understandability of that speech for deaf listeners. :METHOD 'The method used here consisted of the videotaping of a representative sample of six teachers of the deaf from two states of Australia. They were telling a simple short story (a five- to eight-minute rendition based on seven pictures of a children's game of cricket in a street) to three simulated gro·ups of students, age eight to nine years: one group was hearing students (the Hearing group), one of severely and profoundly "oral-only" deaf students (the Oral group), and one of severely and profoundly deaf students taught via simultaneous communication (the Sim-Com group). The researchers gave the teachers a book containing the selected story the night before the experimental session and asked them to familiarize themselves with it. During the session the teachers were asked to retell the...

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