Discovery and expository methods in teaching visual consonant and word identification

An experiment was conducted to examine the processes involved in lipreading as well as to investigate an optimal approach to teaching lipreading skill. We compared discovery and expository methods of learning to lip-read. Twenty-six college students with normal hearing were trained over 3 days to lip-read consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. The training material consisted of a prerecorded videotape of four different talkers. The task was a forced-choice procedure with feedback. Subjects learned with training, but there was no difference between the two learning methods. As a retention measure, subjects returned 4 weeks later and repeated the training. There were significant savings of the original learning. Three weeks after the retention phase, subjects were tested with a 10-item forced-choice monosyllabic word task. Those subjects who had extensive training on CV syllables did no better on identifying the monosyllabic words than did a control group of 9 subjects with no training. Nevertheless, performance for all three groups (discovery, expository, and no training) improved during training in the word identification task.