Phonological Priming in Children with Hearing Loss: Effect of Speech Mode, Fidelity, and Lexical Status.

All children had to communicate aurally or orally and had no other diagnosed or suspected disabilities, so the results may not apply to children who rely on other communication modes or have additional disabilities. The normal-hearing group had higher-than-average vocabulary, which may limit generalization to normal-hearing children with average vocabulary. Baseline naming times differed substantially between groups, so priming had to be expressed as a proportion rather than only as raw milliseconds. The outcome was picture naming time in an indirect laboratory task, not a clinical speech, language, or learning outcome. One hearing-loss group result for high-fidelity nonwords only approached significance, so the visual speech effect was not significant for every condition.

Do not conclude that adding visual speech to therapy has been shown to improve spoken language outcomes in children with hearing loss. The study measured faster picture naming in a laboratory priming task, not clinical speech or language gains.