摘要：Acoustic phonetic studies on the speech of speech clinicians were conducted, when speech clinicians communicated with speech and/or language impaired children through regular, one-to-one training sessions. The participants in this study included three speech clinicians and twelve children with a speech and/or language disorder. Four children of different severities of the speech and/or language disorder were assigned to each speech clinician. The speech clinician read a short script to the child, and in isolation (serving as a baseline). Each scenario contained one target sentence to be studied in terms of mean pitch, maximum pitch and minimum pitch. Results show that while mean and maximum pitches increasingly differ from baseline, to high-level comprehension and to low-level comprehension children, the minimum pitch value does not differ across the levels of comprehension. This study illustrates the way linguistic phonetic enhancement is achieved by speech clinicians for facilitating communicative comprehension by children with speech and/or language impairment.
