Speechreading Ability Is Related to Phonological Awareness and Single-Word Reading in Both Deaf and Hearing Children.
Elizabeth Buchanan-Worster, Mairéad MacSweeney, Hannah Pimperton and 5 others
PMID 33108258WHAT IT FOUND
Speechreading ability links to single-word reading in both deaf and hearing children, but this link runs entirely through phonological awareness.
Better visual speech decoding supports phonological skills, which then support reading. This is a concurrent correlation, not proof that training speechreading improves reading.
Key findings
01In deaf children, the relationship between speechreading and single-word reading was fully mediated by phonological awareness.
02In hearing children, the relationship between speechreading and single-word reading was also fully mediated by phonological awareness.
03A training study cited by the authors found that speechreading training improved speechreading and speech output but did not improve single-word reading or explicit phonological awareness.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The data is concurrent, meaning it shows relationships at one point in time, not cause and effect. We do not know if speechreading causes better phonological awareness or vice versa. The sample size for deaf children (66) is small for structural equation modeling, limiting the ability to check if the model works differently for subgroups (e.g., those using sign language vs. spoken English only). The authors cite a training study that failed to show that improving speechreading led to better reading, which contradicts the simple interpretation that training one will fix the other.
Declared interests
The research was supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Deafness Cognition and Language Research Centre. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that speechreading training will improve reading skills. The study shows a correlation mediated by phonological awareness, but the authors cite a separate training trial where speechreading practice improved speechreading but had no effect on reading or phonological awareness.