The effectiveness of Visual Phonics on the speech production of hearing-impaired children

The effects of intensive multisensory speech training, with and without the use of Visual Phonics techniques, on the speech production of a profoundly hearing-impaired child were studied over a period of 6 weeks. A nine-year-old profoundly hearing-impaired child received 30-40 minutes of intensive speech training daily. Three target phonemes were trained using only multisensory speech training techniques and three target phonemes were trained using multisensory and Visual Phonics training techniques. The subject's productions of target phonemes in trained words and syllables were audio-taped at the end of each training period. Audio-taped productions were rated as correct or incorrect. The number of correct productions in words and syllables were tallied daily. Results show a general trend of improved production for all phonemes trained. There was no differential effect for the training technique used. It was concluded that intensive training, regardless of the technique used, has a positive effect on the speech productions of a profoundly hearing-impaired child