Quantification of the effects of training the auditory-visual reception of connected speech

The tracking method of auditory-visual speech reception training was used with normal hearing subjects in an attempt to quantify the effectiveness of this procedure, which uses connected discourse. A related purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a contextually based training procedure on the recognition of syllables (visemes), sentences, and connected discourse. Results of this study indicated that all subjects improved in their ability to track connected discourse over a span of several training sessions; however, asymptotic performance was not achieved by any subject. Furthermore, results indicated significant improvement on post-training tests of syllable recognition and intelligibility estimation of connected discourse for the experimental subjects. However, no significant improvement was observed for sentence recognition. Implications for the tracking method as part of an aural rehabilitation program are discussed.