Rehearsal strategies in young hearing impaired children.

In this investigation three groups of ten subjects each, ages seven to nine, were compared on common object picture span identification tasks to determine if the rehearsal strategies of oral labeling, signing, or total communication significantly effected their visual memory. Thethree groups consisted of a good learner/normal hearing (NH) group, a hearing impaired poor speechreader/learning disabled (LD) group, and a hearing impaired good learner/good speechreader total communication (TC) group.Subjects' picture span identification performances with and without rehearsal were compared by a one way ANOVA for difference scores. The F value of 62.026 was significant at the .01 level which demonstrated a significant difference among the groups' difference scores. Statistical results between groups indicated that the signing rehearsal strategy significantly improved the LD group's scores on the rehearsed picture span taskas compared to the oral labeling and total communication rehearsal strategies of the NH and IC groups whose rehearsal had little effect on their performance.In summary, this study showed that poor learners/poor speechreaders greatly benefitted from overt rehearsal strategies on a visual memory picture identification task.Thesis (M.A.