Residual hearing, phoneme recognition, speech production errors, and selected background variables were examined in 40 congenitally deaf children of normal intelligence who had no apparent anomalies other than deafness, in an effort to identify factors most closely associated with speech intelligibility. Mean intelligibility of the recorded speech of the children, to inexperienced listeners, was 18.7%, corresponding closely with results of previous studies. Scores on the total and some portions of the phoneme recognition test showed significant correlations with both phoneme production and speech intelligibility. The correlation between phoneme production errors and intelligibility was −0.80. A sizable proportion of the dispersion could be accounted for by certain prosodic errors, such as those resulting from improper phonatory control. Errors of place of articulation and voicing remained in essentially the same proportion for all speakers. Errors of manner and combined place and manner of articulation showed a slight systematic decrease from the poorest to the best speakers. Omissions decreased sharply, but not systematically. Vowel errors showed the most marked and systematic decrease as intelligibility improved. Children of deaf parents were poorer in phoneme recognition and in speech intelligibility than children with comparable residual hearing but with hearing parents.
Young people's encounters with sexual media are the subject of intense concern, but the research underpinning policy debate and public discussion rarely pays attention to the complexity of these. In this article, we show how encounters with pornography are increasingly presented as matters of health and well-being, but often from a standpoint of 'exposure and effects' that offers little in the way of understanding the significance of pornography in people's lives. We consider what our recent research on porn consumption suggests about young people's encounters and engagements with pornography -focusing on porn as an 'outlet', the development of porn tastes and the relation of porn to young people's developing sex lives and imaginations. We argue that it is productive to understand pornography as a site for developing sexual identities and relationships, as a form of sexual leisure and play, and in relation to the broader emergence of mediated intimacies.
As part of research for a teaching session I entered the words pornographication and pornification into Google; the first more unwieldy term collected 7450 hits, while the second was more popular with 28,700 hits. Always one for a bit of procrastination, I started to work my way through some of those hits. I was particularly interested by those which proclaimed The nation has been pornified. 1
As part of a project funded by the Wellcome Trust, we held a oneday symposium, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, to discuss priorities for research on relationships and sex education (RSE) in a world where young people increasingly live, experience, and augment their relationships (whether sexual or not) within digital spaces. The introduction of statutory RSE in schools in England highlights the need to focus on improving understandings of young people and digital intimacies for its own sake, and to inform the development of learning resources. We call for more research that puts young people at its centre; foregrounds inclusivity; and allows a nuanced discussion of pleasures, harms, risks, and rewards, which can be used by those working with young people and those developing policy. Generating such research is likely to be facilitated by participation, collaboration, and communication with beneficiaries, between disciplines and across sectors. Taking such an approach, academic researchers, practitioners, and policymakers agree that we need a better understanding of RSE's place in lifelong learning, which seeks to understand the needs of particular groups, is concerned with non-sexual relationships, and does not see digital intimacies as disconnected from offline everyday 'reality'.
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