Visual speechreading and cognitive performance in hearing-impaired and normal hearing children (11-14 years)

Background. Previous research has demonstrated that parts of the variation in adults speechreading performance can be explained by the characteristics of some cognitive components. However. these results apply to populations of adults and less is known as to how results for populations of adults can be generalised to populations of children. Aim. This study aimed to examine cognitive and visual skills in a group of bilaterally, moderately hearing-impaired children and a group of normal hea ring children and how these two skills relate to variability in speechreadi ng of context-embedded sentences. Sample. Twenty-three hearing-impaired children (mean age: 12.7) and 23 norm al hearing children (mean age: 12.5) matched for age, sex, verbal ability a nd school grades. The mean 'better ear auditory threshold for the hearing-i mpaired was 44.8 dB. Results. The hearing-impaired children outperformed the normal hearing chil dren on a sentence-based speechreading task and on a visual-visual word-dec oding task, but not on a word-discrimination task. Differing from the case of adults, most cognitive tasks proved to be significantly related to sente nce-based speechreading performance, where working memory capacity and visu al word-decoding: skill proved to be the strongest predictors. Conclusions. Speechreading is more cognitively demanding for children than for adults as they have not developed their cognitive abilities to the same extent as adults. Thus, they have to devote more processing capacity, rela tive to their total cognitive processing capacity, to the speechreading tas k. Skilled visual word-decoding and cognitive skills, together with everyda y exposure to situations where speechreading is required. are some of the c andidates for explanation of the hearing-impaired children's superior speec hreading skill.