Speech Perception by Students with Profoundly Hearing Impairment: The Role of Persian Cued Speech

This study was designed to investigate the effect of Cued Speech (CS) on speech perception abilities of elementary school students with hearing impairment in Tehran.

In this experimental design study, with pretest, post-test and control group, participants were 16 students having profoundly hearing impairment ageing 9-12, whom were selected from Tehran special schools for hearing impaired students. Eight children were taught Cued Speech for five months in an everyday 45-60 minutes sessions program. They were matched with 8 hearing impaired children as the control group. Both control and experimental groups were presented with Auditory Perception test (APT-HI) as pretest, post-test and follow-up. Mixed Repeated Measurement was used to analyze the data.

CS substantially improved performance of the experimental group (p<0.05) but there was no significantly important difference between pre-test, post-test and following scores of the control group (p<0.05).

This study supports the use of Persian CS for improving auditory perception abilities in the hearing-impaired children.