Articulation and two speechreading tests were administered to 42 hearing-impaired adults before and after individualized speech therapy to study: the effect of speech training on speechreading and relationships between consonant production and recognition. Analysis of pre/post scores revealed significant improvement in both production and recognition. Significant correlations were obtained between production and recognition; however, the relationship varied relative to manner and place of production. Acoustic and visual features of consonants are discussed relative to this finding.

If visual speech training aids are to be used effectively, it is important to assess whether hearing-impaired speakers can accurately interpret visual patterns and arrive at correct conclusions concerning the accuracy of speech production. In this investigation with the Speech Spectrographic Display (SSD), a pattern interpretation task was given to 10 hearing-impaired adults. Subjects viewed selected SSD patterns from hearing-impaired speakers, evaluated the accuracy of speech production, and identified the SSD visual features that were used in the evaluation. In general, results showed that subjects could use SSD patterns to evaluate speech production. For those pattern interpretation errors that occurred most were related either to phonetic/orthographic confusions or to misconceptions concerning production of speech.

Speech, speechreading, and manual reception skills of 78 deaf students were evaluated over a 2-year interval of residency at NTID. This was done to determine the relative stability of these skills within an integrated environment which stresses the use of amplification and oral-aural instruction. Analysis of data revealed that most students made significant gains in manual communication with no associated deterioration in speech or speechreading skill.