Predicting Early Literacy: Auditory and Visual Speech Decoding in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children.
Sascha Couvee, Loes Wauters, Ludo Verhoeven and 2 others
PMID 35817315WHAT IT FOUND
For deaf and hard-of-hearing children, speechreading predicted phonological awareness and letter knowledge, explaining 52% and 38% of the variance respectively.
Auditory discrimination did not predict either. Hearing children's literacy scores were not predicted by either skill.
Key findings
01In DHH children, speechreading was the only significant predictor of phonological awareness, explaining 52% of the variance, while auditory discrimination was not significant.
02In DHH children, speechreading predicted letter knowledge, explaining 38% of the variance, whereas auditory discrimination had no significant effect.
03DHH children scored below chance on the auditory discrimination task and significantly lower than hearing children on auditory discrimination and phonological awareness, but groups did not differ on speechreading or letter knowledge.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The DHH sample was skewed toward special education schools, limiting generalizability to DHH children in mainstream settings. The cross-sectional design prevents causal conclusions about the relationship between speechreading and literacy development. Phonological awareness and letter knowledge tasks were administered face-to-face, potentially allowing children to use speechreading cues during the outcome measures themselves, which complicates the interpretation of the predictive relationship. Data on the specific use of sign language or sign support during literacy instruction were not collected, so the influence of bimodal communication on outcomes is unclear.
Declared interests
Funded by Royal Dutch Kentalis. No other conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of prediction from auditory discrimination in the hearing group as evidence that auditory skills are unimportant for literacy. The hearing group's high auditory discrimination scores may have created a ceiling effect or reduced variance, masking the relationship, and the study design was not powered to detect subtle predictors in a typically developing group.