Lipreading Ability and Its Cognitive Correlates in Typically Developing Children and Children With Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: Lipreading and its cognitive correlates were studied in school-age children with typical language development and delayed language development due to specific language impairment (SLI).

Method: Forty-two children with typical language development and 20 children with SLI were tested by using a word-level lipreading test and an extensive battery of standardized cognitive and linguistic tests.

Results: Children with SLI were poorer lipreaders than their typically developing peers.

Audiovisual speech perception in children with developmental language disorder in degraded listening conditions.

Purpose: The effect of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the perception of audiovisual speech in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) was investigated by varying the noise level and the sound intensity of acoustic speech. The main hypotheses were that the McGurk effect (in which incongruent visual speech alters the auditory speech percept) would be weaker for children with DLD than for controls and that it would get stronger with decreasing SNR in both groups.

Method: The participants were 8-year-old children with DLD and a sample of children with normal language development.

Individual differences in sign language abilities in deaf children.

The study attempted to identify characteristics of individual differences in sign language abilities among deaf children. Connections between sign language skills and rapid serial naming, hand motor skills, and early fluency were investigated. The sample consisted of 85 Finnish deaf children.