ABSTRACT
Prelingually deaf children especially must overcome great difficulties in acquiring skills for verbal communication. Deafness is a hearing handicap that is so severe that understanding spoken language mainly by hearing will never be possible. During the process of speech-acquisition a hearing child tries to match its own acoustic products with an external norm that is auditorily defined, that is the acoustic products of other people. Deaf speakers often neutralise vowels; almost all studies report this phenomenon. Despite the fact that transcription methods had not been standardised, correlational studies have recognised the significance of prosodic deviations in deaf speech. Instead of relying on subjective ratings, an alternative way of studying suprasegmentals of speech starts from measurement of the most relevant acoustic parameters. A very serious handicap of the correlational method is caused by the fact that, in natural speech, acoustic dimensions do not vary independently.
