Lipreading in school-age children: the roles of age, hearing status, and cognitive ability

PURPOSE The study addressed three research questions: Does lipreading improve between the ages of 7 and 14 years? Does hearing loss affect the development of lipreading? How do individual differences in lipreading relate to other abilities? METHOD Forty children with normal hearing (NH) and 24 with hearing loss (HL) were tested using 4 lipreading instruments plus measures of perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic abilities. RESULTS For both groups, lipreading performance improved with age on all 4 measures of lipreading, with the HL group performing better than the NH group. Scores from the 4 measures loaded strongly on a single principal component. Only age, hearing status, and visuospatial working memory were significant predictors of lipreading performance. CONCLUSIONS Results showed that children's lipreading ability is not fixed but rather improves between 7 and 14 years of age. The finding that children with HL lipread better than those with NH suggests experience plays an important role in the development of this ability. In addition to age and hearing status, visuospatial working memory predicts lipreading performance in children, just as it does in adults. Future research on the developmental time-course of lipreading could permit interventions and pedagogies to be targeted at periods in which improvement is most likely to occur.