Abstract
Visual information conveyed by a speaking face aids speech perception. In addition, children’s ability to comprehend visual-only speech (speechreading ability) is related to phonological awareness and reading skills in both deaf and hearing children. We tested whether training speechreading would improve speechreading, phoneme blending, and reading ability in hearing children. Ninety-two hearing 4- to 5-year-old children were randomised into two groups: business-as-usual controls, and an intervention group, who completed three weeks of computerised speechreading training. The intervention group showed greater improvements in speechreading than the control group at post-test both immediately after training and 3 months later. This was the case for both trained and untrained words. There were no group effects on the phonological awareness or single-word reading tasks, although those with the lowest phoneme blending scores did show greater improvements in blending as a result of training. The improvement in speechreading in hearing children following brief training is encouraging. The results are also important in suggesting a hypothesis for future investigation: that a focus on visual speech information may contribute to phonological skills, not only in deaf children but also in hearing children who are at risk of reading difficulties. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBdpliGkbkY.
Highlights
Phonological awareness is well-established as an important predictor of reading development in hearing children (Caravolas et al, 2012; Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Hatcher et al, 2004; Hulme et al, 2002)
We have recently shown that speechreading training using the Speechreading Training and Reading (STAR) programme led to improvements in sentence-level speechreading and in speech production, which was used as a proxy measure of their phonological representations (Pimperton et al, 2019)
This suggests that improvements in speechreading in young children can arise as a result of short-term training regardless of the extent to which the individual relies on visual speech information to access spoken language in daily life
Summary
Phonological awareness is well-established as an important predictor of reading development in hearing children (Caravolas et al, 2012; Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Hatcher et al, 2004; Hulme et al, 2002). Given the importance of phonological awareness in hearing children’s reading development it is of interest to understand how phonological awareness develops. Phonological awareness tasks require children to manipulate the sublexical structure of words. Such tasks are believed to relate to reading because they assess the quality and specificity of abstract representations of the phonological structure of spoken words. These underlying phonological representations are thought of as depending on interactions between auditory speech input and articulatory outputs. Visual speech that is congruent with auditory speech enhances speech perception in adults
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