Speechreading Skills of Young Normal Hearing and Deaf Children

This study compared the speechreading performance of deaf children to that of normal hearing children. Performance was assessed across word, phrase, and sentence stimuli. Analyses were performed to determine if there were both quantitative and qualitative differences between the two groups.

Results revealed significantly better performance by the normal hearing children on all stimuli. Both groups, however, performed significantly better on word than either phrase or sentence stimuli. Further, both groups experienced greater difficulty with the identification of verbs and adjectives than nouns. An important difference, however, was that the normal hearing children may have been assisted by the visible aspects of words while the deaf children seemed to be influenced solely by language structure.