Le. Bernstein et al., Enhanced speechreading in deaf adults: Can short-term training/practice close the gap for hearing adults?, J SPEECH L, 44(1), 2001, pp. 5-18
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.