Training influences on visual consonant and sentence recognition

Visual consonant and sentence reception were compared in three groups of 10 normal-hearing young adult subjects including a Training group that received 14 hours of videotaped analytic visual consonant recognition training with 100% feedback concerning the correctness of their responses, a Pseudotraining group that received the same treatment as the Training group with the exception that they were not given any information about whether their responses were correct or not, and a Control group. While all three groups scored significantly higher on the post-treatment visual consonant recognition test, there was no significant difference between the Training group and the Pseudotraining group in terms of improvement scores. Furthermore, none of the groups improved in their ability to recognize visually presented sentence length material. These results are discussed in terms of the development of task-specific performance skills.