Phonological Processes of the Speech of 4-7 Year-old Hearing Impaired Children Using Hearing Aids in Mashhad

Hearing and speech are two important elements in establishing a natural and practical human communication. In early years of language learning, children take advantage of phonological processes to pronounce words more simply. The purpose of the present research is to review phonological processes used in the speech of hearing impaired children who use hearing aids. This descriptive-analytic research was conducted on 15 hearing impaired Persian speaking children of 4 to 7 years old who had no visual, physical, emotional, mental or psychological impairment. The Persian phonological test (PPT) was conducted on these monolingual Persian speaking children. PPT is a test to assess phonological understanding in which the linguistic data is collected by pronouncing the name of different pictures by examinees. The results of this study show that phonological processes used by these children are: lenition, deletion, insertion, assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis and compensatory lengthening. The processes of deletion and assimilation had high frequencies in the speech of these children.