Primary Modality for Speech Perception in Children with Normal and Impaired Hearing

The relationships between each of seven predictor variables and the relative degree to which 84 normal and hearing-impaired children used audition or vision in their perception of word stimuli were investigated. The children's relative use of audition or vision was assessed by the auditory-visual presentation of monosyllabic word stimuli in which the visual word stimuli were in conflict with those presented acoustically. Six of the seven predictor variables were significantly correlated with the performance scores obtained within the auditory-visual conflict condition. Only pure-tone average hearing level and auditory word identification performance, however, made unique contributions toward predicting the degree to which audition or vision was used in the perception of the word stimuli. We concluded that the relative use of audition or vision was almost completely related to their auditory capabilities as represented by the children's unaided threshold sensitivity and aided speech reception performance.