Differences between read and spontaneous speech of deaf children.

Recordings were made of 20 congenitally deaf children, who produced spontaneous speech and, at a later session, read their own spontaneous utterances. Intelligibility scores and judgments of appropriateness of intonation, stress, timing, and sentence contour were obtained from experienced listeners. Read-spontaneous speech was more intelligible than spontaneous speech for 16 of the 20 children. Percentage of correct phoneme articulation was not significantly related to intelligibility.