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Unimodal and multimodal communication with hearing impaired students

University of British Columbia

The purpose of this study was to gather data on hearing impaired students' reception of language presented through each of five communication modes: oral (speechreading), aural (audition), manual (signs), oral-aural (speechreading plus audition), and simultaneous (speechreading plus audition plus signs). The 106 subjects (53 females, 53 males) had a mean age of 17 5.4 months and mean hearing threshold level (HTL) of 97.7dB. Other personal and demographic data are reported. The procedure utilized a within-subjects design, and four lists of stimulus sentences which were constructed so as to control for vocabulary level and visemic content of lexical items, phrase and syntactic structure, and length. To ensure consistency across trials, sentence lists were video taped. Each subject received twelve sentences through each of the five modes. After each sentence, subjects were alloted 30 seconds in which to write it in the appropriate blanks in an answer booklet . One mark was awarded for each correct word in the appropria blank, for a possible maximum score of 57 for each mode. The highest scores were obtained under simultaneous (X = 33.2) and manual (X = 31.5) which were greater (p < .01) than other modes. The score for oral-aural (X = 7.3) was higher (p < .05) than oral (X = 3.8) or aural (X = 3.1). None of the other differences were significant. Separate analyses were performed to determine the effect of a number of personal and demographic variables on subjects' performance under each mode. Results of the multiple stepwise regression procedure indicated that subjects' syntactic ability accounted for a large proportion of the variance in all but the aural mode. Effects of independent variables varied between modes, emphasizing the difficulties inherent in matched sample best-method studies. Results are discussed in light of various theories of cognitive processing and selective attention. Implications and suggestions for further study are presented.

Text

2010-06-14

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/25706

Special Education

University of British Columbia

Graduate