The effect of hearing status on speechreading performance of Chinese adolescents

The effect of hearing status on the ability to speechread is poorly understood, and current findings are inconclusive regarding differences in speechreading performance between children and adults with hearing impairment and those with normal hearing. In this study, we investigated the effect of hearing status on speechreading skills in Chinese adolescents. Thirty seven severely deaf students with a mean pure-tone average of 93 dB hearing threshold level and 21 hearing controls aged 16 completed tasks measuring their speechreading of simplex finals (monophthongs), complex finals (diphthongs or vowel + nasal constellations) and initials (consonants) in Chinese. Both accuracy rate and response time data were collected. Results showed no significant difference in accuracy between groups. By contrast, deaf individuals were significantly faster at speechreading than their hearing controls. In addition, for both groups, performance on speechreading simplex finals was faster and more accurate than complex finals, which in turn was better than initial consonants. We conclude that speechreading skills in Chinese adolescents are influenced by hearing status, characteristics of sounds to be identified, as well as the measures used.