Enhanced speechreading in deaf adults: Can short-term training/practice close the gap for hearing adults?

This study investigated effects of short-term training/practice on group an d individual differences in deaf and hearing speechreaders. In two experime nts, participants speechread sentences with feedback during training and wi thout Feedback during testing, alternating 10 times over six sessions spann ing up to 5 weeks. Testing used sentence sets balanced for expected mean pe rformance. In each experiment, participants were adults who reported good s peechreading and either normal hearing (n = 8) or severe to profound hearin g impairments (n = 8). The experiments were replicates, except that in one participants received vibrotactile speech stimuli in addition to visible sp eech during training, testing whether vibrotactile speech enhances speechre ading learning. Results showed that (a) training/practice did not alter the relative performance among individuals or groups; (b) significant learning occurred when training and testing were conducted with speechreading only (although the magnitude of the effect was small); and (c) there was evidenc e that the vibrotactile training depressed rather than raised speechreading scores over the training period.