Listener judges and the speech intelligibility of deaf children

Two listener groups, one experienced and the other inexperienced in listening to deaf speakers, were asked to recognize speech sounds in word contexts presented in two modes: auditory only and auditory-visual. In contrast to previous studies, the experienced and inexperienced listener groups performed similarly. The one exception occurred for speech sounds in the final position presented auditory visually where the experienced listeners' performance surpassed that of inexperienced listeners. For both groups, performance in correct phoneme identification was better in the auditory-visual mode of presentation. Furthermore, an interaction between the position-in-word and the mode of stimulus presentation was present in both groups. In the auditory-only task, listeners correctly identified more target phonemes when they were initial rather than final position in a word. With supplemental visual information, listener performance increased our phenomes in both positions within a word, althought the increase was greater for final position phonemes.