It is hypothesized that training that improves lipreading in older adults can carry over to untrained lipreading materials and to audiovisual speech recognition in noise. Participants receive pre- and post-training tests of speech recognition with visual-only, auditory-only, and audiovisual spoken sentences and isolated words. During pre- and post-training tests, they carry out forced choice identification of lipread consonants. Participants who are assigned to a training arm train on lipreading isolated sentences (Aim 1) or on learning via lipreading sets of isolated nonsense words (Aim 2). Depending on the outcomes of Aims 1 and 2, in Aim 3, new participants receive audiovisual training with conditions from Aims 1 and 2.
The purpose of the study is to assess training of visual speech (lipreading) and audiovisual (lipreading plus auditory) speech as a rehabilitation strategy for hearing loss in adults.