Lipreading in School-Age Children: The Roles of Age, Hearing Status, and Cognitive Ability

• Published in: Journal of speech, language, and hearing research language, and hearing research, 2014-04, Vol.57 (2), p.556-565
• Main Authors: Tye-Murray, Nancy, Hale, Sandra, Spehar, Brent, Myerson, Joel, Sommers, Mitchell S
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Age Differences; Age Factors; Auditory Perception; Child; Child Development; Children; Children & youth; Cognition - physiology; Cognitive Ability; College Students; Comparative Analysis; Deafness; Deafness - physiopathology; Deafness - rehabilitation; Female; Hearing - physiology; Hearing Impairments; Hearing loss; Humans; Individual Differences; Language Development Disorders - physiopathology; Language Development Disorders - rehabilitation; Language Skills; Language Tests; Linguistics; Lipreading; Listening Comprehension; Male; Memory; Memory, Short-Term - physiology; Oral Language; Perceptual Development; Phonetics; Phonological Awareness; Predictor Variables; Reading readiness; Scores; Short Term Memory; Spatial Ability; Spatial Navigation - physiology; Speech Improvement; Visual Perception; Vocabulary
• ISSN: 1092-4388; 1558-9102
• DOI: 10.1044/2013_JSLHR-H-12-0273

Purpose: The study addressed three research questions: Does lipreading improve between the ages of 7 and 14 years? Does hearing loss affect the development of lipreading? How do individual differences in lipreading relate to other abilities? Method: Forty children with normal hearing (NH) and 24 with hearing loss (HL) were tested using 4 lipreading instruments plus measures of perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic abilities. Results: For both groups, lipreading performance improved with age on all 4 measures of lipreading, with the HL group performing better than the NH group. Scores from the 4 measures loaded strongly on a single principal component. Only age, hearing status, and visuospatial working memory were significant predictors of lipreading performance. Conclusions: Results showed that children's lipreading ability is not fixed but rather improves between 7 and 14 years of age. The finding that children with HL lipread better than those with NH suggests experience plays an important role in the development of this ability. In addition to age and hearing status, visuospatial working memory predicts lipreading performance in children, just as it does in adults. Future research on the developmental time-course of lipreading could permit interventions and pedagogies to be targeted at periods in which improvement is most likely to occur.