Despite the body of research on auditory-visual speech perception in infants and schoolchildren, development in the early childhood period remains relatively uncharted. In this study, English-speaking children between three and four years of age were investigated for: (i) the development of visual speech perception--lip-reading and visual…

Individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD) may experience, besides reading problems, other speech-related processing deficits. Here, we examined the influence of visual articulatory information (lip-read speech) at various levels of background noise on auditory word recognition in children and adults with DD. We found that children with a…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to explore the audiovisual speech perception strategies.80.23.47 adopted by normal-hearing and deaf people in processing familiar and unfamiliar languages. Our primary hypothesis was that they would adopt different perception strategies due to different sensory experiences at an early age, limitations…

For children who are born deaf, lipreading (speechreading) is an important source of access to spoken language. We used eye tracking to investigate the strategies used by deaf (n = 33) and hearing 5-8-year-olds (n = 59) during a sentence speechreading task. The proportion of time spent looking at the mouth during speech correlated positively with…

Purpose: We developed and evaluated in a randomized controlled trial a computerized speechreading training program to determine (a) whether it is possible to train speechreading in deaf children and (b) whether speechreading training results in improvements in phonological and reading skills. Previous studies indicate a relationship between…

We tested the capability of deaf adolescents, including a group of users of cochlear implants, to generate inferences during spoken language comprehension and whether they benefited from the use of sign-supported speech (SSS). Stimuli consisted of 24 short video-recorded texts in spoken language and in SSS. Participants responded to literal and…

Purpose: Lipreading and its cognitive correlates were studied in school-age children with typical language development and delayed language development due to specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Forty-two children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI were tested by using a word-level lipreading test and an extensive…

When identifying phonemes in new spoken words, lipreading is an important source of information for many deaf people. Because many groups of phonemes are virtually indistinguishable by sight, deaf people are able to identify about 30% of phonemes when lipreading non-words. Cued speech (CS) is a system of hand shapes and hand positions used…

The aim of this paper is to analyse oral communication strategies in English as a foreign language (EFL) of deaf and hard of hard-of-hearing (D/HH) students. The paper is based on an action research case study concerning oral communication strategies of this group of students with special educational needs. The results demonstrate that when they…

While L2 production is widely understood to show traces of L1 interference and general cue availability, the role of visual cue strength on L2 production is previously unstudied. As such, this experiment compares the production of 10 L2 Italian speakers' intervocalic /p/ - /pp/ and /k/ - /kk/ contrasts, to see if the more visible labial pair is…

The present study set out to explore effective teaching techniques using PowerPoint for post-secondary students with disabilities by comparing their views to those of students without disabilities. 284 Canadian post-secondary social science students, 75 of whom self-reported a disability, were surveyed about what aspects of PowerPoint use helps…

The article furthers the study of urban multilingual (i.e. metrolingual) practices, in particular the study of customer interactions, by a focus on the use of gestures in these practices. The article focuses on fluent deaf signers and hearing non-signers in Mumbai who use gestures to communicate with each other, often combined with mouthing,…

The aim of the study is to describe the performance of deaf and hearing people while speechreading Spanish, a language with transparent orthography, and to relate this skill to reading efficiency. Three groups of 27 participants each were recruited: a group of deaf participants, a chronological age-matched hearing group and a reading age-matched…

Adults use vision to perceive low-fidelity speech; yet how children acquire this ability is not well understood. The literature indicates that children show reduced sensitivity to visual speech from kindergarten to adolescence. We hypothesized that this pattern reflects the effects of complex tasks and a growth period with harder-to-utilize…

Forty-one children with severe-profound prelingual hearing loss were assessed on single word reading, reading comprehension, English vocabulary, phonological awareness and speechreading at three time points, 1 year apart (T1-T3). Their progress was compared with that of a group of hearing children of similar nonverbal IQ, initially reading at the…