Information-processing skill and speech-reading

Two measures of verbal inference-making ability (a sentence-completion test; SCT, and a word-completion test; WCT) and one test of working memory capacity were examined in relation to speech-reading performance. The results demonstrated that the SCT proved to be the only variable that was substantially correlated with speech-reading performance. The contribution from working memory capacity and the WCT test to speech-reading is mainly via their contribution to the SCT. Skilled SCT-performance was particularly tied to speech-reading conditions with a low level of contextual information accompanying the speech-reading task. No general or specific difference was found between hearing-impaired and normally-hearing subjects in the speech-reading test, thus indicating that speech-reading performance cannot be predicted by factors related to the hearing-impairment. Rather, information-processing skills seem to be decisive.