Student 4 is a young adult female born in China. She grew up speaking Chinese with her parents. She has a severe to profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss with etiology reported as a high fever at one year of age. She attended regular public schools in China without any support services provided. She never learned any sign language in China. She came to RIT in the late 90’s to study Computer Science.

You may view an introduction to Student 4.

She is currently beginning her fourth year at RIT and has had support from the speech language department throughout this time.

Background Information:

Degree of deafness/PTA: Symmetric, severe to profound sensori-neural loss, bilateral, with hearing out to 4,000 Hz. Her PTA is 95db in right ear all the time. She took ESL classes in China before coming to the US. She did not have any speech-language therapy or sign language instruction. She is reported as speaking Chinese intelligibly although "imperfectly." She has had no experience with sign language in China and began taking ASL classes at the same time as she began speech therapy.

Diagnostic Results

Entering Speech Intelligibility

NTID Write-Down Test: 82% (3.8) on a 1=low to 5=high scale).

Voice (Qualitative)

NTID Voice Evaluation: demonstrates slight elevation of pitch with noticeable breaks of small magnitude when reading. Her rate was moderately slow with severe problems with stress and inflection as expected of a speaker of another language. She also exhibitied a mild problem in blending and coarticulation especially characterized by an addition of a syllable after voiced and voiceless endings which is also typical of a hearing speaker of Chinese. She used appropriate intensity levels and had a slight deficiency in air expenditure. There was no evidence of nasal resonance or vocal tension.

Speech/Articulation

Fisher-Logemann Test of Articulation Competence: showed a total error of 47% with 54% total consonant error. The majority of the consonant errors were in the fricative category. Air was being emitted laterally on the fricatives. Also noteworthy is the addition os a syllable on the final position of the stops. A 19% vowel error represents a subsitution of the high front vowel /i/ (key) for both vowels and a subsitution of the high back vowel /u/ (two) for both vowels. Also notes was a distortion of vowel /r/. The addition of a syllable on the final position of stops and the vowel erros noted are common challenges for speakers of English whose first language is Chinese.

Fisher-Logemann Test of Articulation Competence (words): 78% total errors; 82% consonant errors; 61% vowel errors; of consonant errors 55% = deletions, 24% = manner of phonation errors, 9% = voicing errors; correct consonant sounds = /b, d, w, f, v, l/

Language

Her initial NTID writing test shows a grasp of basic English grammar with simplistic vocabulary and topic. She goes from past to present habitual tense correctly most of the time. Most of her sentences are simple structurally but there is evidence of complex structures using "because," "if," and "before." This writing sample placed her into Level III English which indicates a good poential for succeeding in RIT Liberal Arts.

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