Hearing deficiency, speechreading and memory functions

Twelve deaf and 12 normally hearing subjects participated in the present study. The deaf subjects, who had acquired their handicap as adults, exhibited superior recall performance for recency items (short-term memory items) of a list of visually presented words compared to the normal group. Current models of memory and modality effects were unable to handle both recall and output order data. Instead it was argued that the notion of visual skills, being supportive of remembering (see Rönnberg, 1980) had the largest explanatory power. Speechreading did not differ between groups, but interesting correlations between type of speechreading test, skill in speechreading and memory performance was discussed.