Phonological store and speechreading performance of Chinese students with hearing impairment

ABSTRACT

This study presents three experiments to examine the role of the phonological store component of working memory in the speechreading performance of students with hearing impairment (HI) in China. In Experiment 1, 86 high school students with HI completed an immediate serial recall task with four lists of monosyllabic words that differed in phonological and visual similarities. In Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, 40 participants divided into high or low phonological store capacity (PS) and 40 participants divided into high or low visual phonological story capacity (VPS) completed a speechreading test at the word, phrase and sentence levels. Results revealed that (1) immediate serial recall showed effects of phonological and visual similarity and their interaction; (2) there was no significant effect of phonological store capacities on speechreading; and (3) there was a significant effect of visual phonological store capacities on accuracy but not speed of speechreading. These findings point to a general phonological store system for visual orthographic coding and phonological coding that students with HI engage in speechreading in Chinese. It provides evidence for the contention that the visual-based coding has a more direct impact on speechreading performance of Chinese students with HI than the speech-based coding.

KEYWORDS:

• Phonological store
• speechreading
• Chinese
• hearing impairment
• working memory
• immediate serial recall

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants, their families, and the teachers in the conduct of this research.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the fellowship of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2020M672385].