Visual Rhyme Judgment in Adults With Mild-to-Severe Hearing Loss

Abstract

Adults with poorer peripheral hearing have slower phonological processing speed measured using visual rhyme tasks, and it has been suggested that this is due to fading of phonological representations stored in long-term memory. Representations of both vowels and consonants are likely to be important for determining whether or not two printed words rhyme. However, it is not known whether the relation between phonological processing speed and hearing loss is specific to the lower frequency ranges which characterize vowels or higher frequency ranges that characterize consonants. We tested the visual rhyme ability of 212 adults with hearing loss. As in previous studies, we found that rhyme judgments were slower and less accurate when there was a mismatch between phonological and orthographic information. A substantial portion of the variance in the speed of making correct rhyme judgment decisions was explained by lexical access speed. Reading span, a measure of working memory, explained further variance in match but not mismatch conditions, but no additional variance was explained by auditory variables. This pattern of findings suggests possible reliance on a lexico-semantic word-matching strategy for solving the rhyme judgment task. Future work should investigate the relation between adoption of a lexico-semantic strategy during phonological processing tasks and hearing aid outcome.

The Influence of Form- and Meaning-Based Predictions on Cortical Speech Processing Under Challenging Listening Conditions: A MEG Study

“…As a lower false alarm rate reflects better task performance, this result suggests that individuals with greater WM capacity were less likely to incorrectly classify final words phonologically related to the expected word as correct. In other words, individuals with greater WM capacity are less susceptible to phonological lures when listening to speech under challenging conditions (for a discussion see p.2 in Rudner et al, 2019). Furthermore, participants with higher WM capacity had smaller N400 effects in response to final words with deviant meaning compared to participants with lower WM capacity, indicating that the processing of phonologically related final words requires less neural resources for listeners with higher WM capacity.…”

Poor Performer: A Distinct Entity in Cochlear Implant Users?

“…In order to strengthen a lexico-semantic strategy during word processing, targeted phonological training should be included [Moberly et al, 2017;Rudner et al, 2019] as this is the case in children suffering from dyslexia [Schneider et al, 2000;Glück, 2003;Siegmüller, 2008;Gilliver et al, 2016]. Significant positive effects on improved phonological processing have been reported after a 4-week training of computer-assisted phonemegrapheme correspondence in 32 children with hearing impairment [Nakeva von Mentzer et al, 2013], especially in those severely impaired.…”

Effects of orthographic transparency on rhyme judgement

“…The experience of processing opaque orthographies enables bilinguals to become more sensitive to the relationship between representations in orthography and phonology. Furthermore, by assessing PA using measures such as the rhyme judgement task, Rudner et al (2019) showed that the orthographic representations of one’s language can influence phonological processing. Specifically, cross-language transfer of PA between orthographies of different transparencies has been observed.…”