LINKING VISUAL AND KINESTHETIC IMAGERY IN LIPREADING INSTRUCTION

The purpose of this study was to replicate van Uden's (1983) finding t hat watching oneself speak improves lipreading of visually confusable nonsense words. Specifically, this replication focused on an older gro up of subjects whose educational experience varied widely in the empha sis given to spoken communication. Four groups of 12 young-adult subje cts who are deaf participated in evaluating two aspects of training: ( a) source of video feedback (self or trainer), and (b) timing of feedb ack (during speech production or after speech production). Mean postte st results indicated significantly increased accuracy in identifying i tems that had been trained. The group that viewed self-speech after sp eech-production practice also demonstrated generalization to test item s that were not trained. On the combined list of both trained and untr ained items, both groups that viewed their own speech achieved signifi cant gains compared to pretest scores, but those that viewed the train er's speech did not. Response time (RT) during pre- and posttesting wa s measured using a computer-generated waveform display to calculate th e interval between stimulus offset and response onset. Results are rep orted for 13 subjects with greater-than-or-equal-to 50% speech intelli gibility for words in sentences. Although there were no differences at tributable to training conditions, there was an overall increase in th e regularity of the identification responses after training (measured by the standard deviation of RTs) and a generalization of the improvem ent to the untrained items. The results of this study substantiate the beneficial effects of multisensory feedback by practicing lipreading of one's own speech production. This finding appears to apply even to young-adult subjects who are deaf and whose habituated speech patterns may be quite distinct from those of talkers with normal hearing.