Auditory, visual, and auditory-visual recognition of consonants by children with normal and impaired hearing.

Abstract

The consonants /b, d, g, k, m, n, p, t/ were presented to normal-hearing, severely hearing-impaired, and profoundly deaf children through auditory, visual, and combined auditory-visual modalities. Through lipreading alone, all three groups were able to discriminate between the places of articulation (bilabial, alveolar, velar) but not within each place category. When they received acoustic information only, normal-hearing children recognized the consonants nearly perfectly, and severely hearing-impaired children distinguished accurately between voiceless plosives, voiced plosives, and nasal consonants. However, the scores of the profoundly deaf group were low, and they perceived even voicing and nasality cues unreliably. Although both the normal-hearing and the severely hearing-impaired groups achieved nearly perfect recognition scores through simultaneous auditory-visual reception, the performance of the profoundly deaf children was only slightly better than that which they demonstrated through lipreading alone.