The role of visual speech perception (lipreading) in developing phonological representations in young hearing children with poor phonological skills

Although some deaf children do achieve age-appropriate reading levels, on average deaf children's reading is poorer than that of their hearing peers. There are many factors that relate to reading ability in deaf children. Perhaps surprisingly, speechreading ability relates to reading ability in both deaf and hearing children. The working hypothesis underlying my PhD research is that information about the structure of spoken words can be extracted from hearing words and also from speechreading, even by hearing children. This information can help children establish a representation of the structure of words (phonological representation). Children's ability to represent and play with speech patterns in words (phonological awareness) is known to help early single word reading.

Two studies in my PhD showed that for both deaf and hearing children the relationship between speechreading and reading is partly explained by their phonological awareness. My final study adapted a speechreading and reading intervention previously used with deaf children, to show that speechreading can be trained in young hearing children. The children who performed poorest on a test of phonological awareness (putting together the sounds 'b-a-t' to say the word 'bat') also showed improvements on this task as a result of speechreading training.

These studies further our understanding of the relationship between speechreading and reading in deaf and hearing children. This is of potential use to deaf and hearing children who have poor phonological skills and therefore are likely to struggle with reading. These children may benefit from attention being drawn to visual speech information to improve their access to speech patterns in words.

The first aim of this fellowship is to communicate the findings from these studies with the academic community by publishing two papers relating to these studies. In addition, I will present these studies at national and international conferences.

A second aim is to communicate with teachers and primary school children about my research. I will spend a week in a primary school in order to observe how literacy is taught in schools. This will help me understand how my research fits in to this setting. I will also hold an event for teachers to find out what they find most effective and most challenging about literacy education and to get feedback about how my research might relate to their practices. I plan to run class sessions with the primary school children to engage them with my research. This might include playing speechreading games, feeling jelly brains and making pipe-cleaner neurons.
A third aim is to develop my skills as a researcher. This will include learning how to analyse longitudinal datasets and taking advantage of training UCL has to offer in writing grant proposals.
My fourth aim for this fellowship is to extend my findings from my PhD by carrying out further analyses on the data collected. Having established that there are relationships between speechreading, phonological awareness and reading I aim to understand what the direction of the relationships are and how they may change as a child develops. I will use data collected at three different time points from young deaf and hearing children to construct statistical models that would tell us whether any relationship observed between speechreading and later phonological awareness ability explains the relationship between speechreading and reading over time.
These four key aims will help me to achieve my goal of developing a competitive research proposal to investigate the idea those children with poor phonological awareness skills may benefit from speechreading training. By targeting children from lower socio-economic backgrounds and selecting those with poor phonological awareness skills who are therefore at risk of reading difficulties, I will be able to investigate the benefits of visual speech information in developing reading-related skills.