1997 Volume 34 Issue 4 Pages 31-38
New testing material has been developed to study the effects of syllable visibility on speechreading performance of children with hearing impairments. The material consists of 20 Japanese words, all of which are familiar ones of 3 moras. According to visibility level (high/low) and difficulty in lexical meaning (easy/difficult), these words are classified into 4 experimental conditions: high visibility/easy meaning (HE), high visibility/difficult meaning (HD), low visibility/easy meaning (LE), and low visibility/difficult meaning (LD). In an experiment, 20 words videotaped at random with an SVHS VTR were presented without speech sound to 40 children with hearing level of over 90 dB through a 27-inch color CRT monitor. The best score was made under the high visibility/easy meaning (HE) condition. Under the high visibility/difficult (HD) and low visibility/easy (LE) conditions, the scores were almost the same. The worst score was made under the low visibility/difficult (LD) condition. By using ANOVA, it was found that syllable visibility affected not only words with easy meanings but also difficult wrnds.
