Effects of Guessing Strategy on Speechreading Test Scores

An audiovisual speechreading test was administered twice to three groups of normal-hearing subjects listening in a background of multitalker babble. The range of scores on the pretest resembled scores reported in the literature for severely hearing-impaired adults using similar test materials. On the second test presentation, one group of subjects received a monetary reward for guessing, another group was penalized for guessing, and a control group received no instructions about guessing strategy. Posttest scores of the two experimental groups were significantly different. Improvement in posttest scores shown by some subjects in the Control and the Reward Guessing groups was similar to improvement after speechreading training that has been reported by other investigators.