Effects of repair strategies on visual identification of sentences

This investigation determined whether information elicited by repair strategies enhances an individual's ability to lipread a misperceived sentence. Five groups of subjects were each assigned one of five repair strategies: (a) asking the talker to repeat a sentence, (b) simplify it, (c) rephrase it, (d) say an important keyword, and (e) speak two sentences. Subjects viewed sentences spoken by six different talkers. When a subject did not recite a sentence verbatim, the talker performed the assigned repair strategy and then repeated the original sentence. A control group of subjects saw only the original sentence repeated twice. All five test groups demonstrated a significantly greater improvement for the second presentation score (referenced to the first presentation score) than the control group. The benefits provided by the repair strategies were independent of the talker, and benefits did not differ significantly among the groups.