Phonological Capabilities and Speech Understanding

In the present article we will review results from a number of studies conducted in our laboratory where the purpose has been to examine phonological processing capabilities in deafened adults and individuals with a severe hearingimpairment, and to relate their phonological processing skills to visual and audio-visual speech understanding performance. The results show that deafened adults and individuals with a severe hearing-impairment perform at a significantly lower level than normal hearing controls on cognitive tasks that explicitly require phonological processing, whereas there are no differences between the groups in cognitive tasks where the requirements of such processing are less explicit. The characteristics of the individuals ́ phonological processing skills are further correlated with visual speechreading and speech understanding with cochlear implants. The results are discussed with respect to what factors that might cause for a deterioration in phonological processing skills, and the effects on visual and audio-visual speech understanding.