The purpose of this study is to investigate perceptual parsing of speech by hard of hearing listeners. The perception of prosodic phrase continuity in clear and conversational speech will be tested in moderately to profoundly HOH listeners and noise-masked normal-hearing listeners. The main questions this study attempts to answer are: Do moderately to profoundly HOH listeners differ in their use of prosodic cues to syntactic units in fluent speech? Are HOH identification of such units determined by their perception of intonation and/or amplitude characteristics of the utterances? Six experiments are proposed to study the perception of speech prosodic information as a function of hearing loss severity and prevalent communication mode. In two experiments, spoken phrases and utterances artificially assembled to simulate phrases; lexical composition will be tested to determine which sounds most like fluent speech. In four experiments, F0 and utterance amplitude envelope will be tested for their contribution to listeners' perception of phrase integrity.
