Efficacy of a distinctive feature model of therapy for hearing-impaired adolescents

Extensive measures of speech production and perception were secured before and after the individualized training of 75 hearing-impaired postsecondary students to evaluate the efficacy of therapy. Additional measures of hearing, reading, writing, nonverbal intelligence, and manual and simultaneous communication reception were made to explore variables that might influence response to training. Significant improvements in vowel, word and sentence production, and word and sentence perception were observed. Pretherapy measures of speech production and perception were the most powerful factors explaining variability in posttest scores. Other variables predicting the outcome of speech therapy were residual hearing and linguistic competence. Clinical implications are discussed.