Speechreading Training and Reading: The STAR Project

Mairéad MacSweeney – Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Deafness, Cognition and Language Centre, UCL

Hannah Pimperton – Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL

Charles Hulme – Developmental Science, UCL

Margaret Harris – Oxford Brookes University

Fiona Kyle – City University London

Summary

Previous research studies have shown that differences in young deaf children’s speechreading (lipreading) skills seem to have an important influence on how easy they find it to learn to read (Kyle & Harris, 2010; Kyle & Harris, 2011).

We think this is because when deaf children are learning about how written letters map on to sounds (e.g. the letter ‘m’ goes with the sound ‘mmm’), they can use information from lip patterns (e.g. what the lips look like when you make the sound ‘mmm’) to help with this mapping process, especially when they find the sounds difficult to hear and tell apart.

Children who have better speechreading skills will be able to get more detailed information about speech from the lip patterns they see (i.e. more detailed phonological representations), and may be able to use this extra information to help them as they learn to read.

In this project we will develop a computerised intervention consisting of a series of fun games designed specifically to train speechreading skills in young deaf children and to help them to use these skills to support their early reading development.

We will then run a randomised controlled trial (RCT) with 5-7 year old severely and profoundly deaf children to test the efficacy of this intervention in improving speechreading skill, phonological representations and reading. The design of this RCT is outlined in the diagram below.

Further Information

Contact: m.macsweeney@ucl.ac.uk or h.pimperton@ucl.ac.uk

Website: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/dcal/projects/STaR_project

Keywords: deafness, children, speechreading, reading, RCT