Speechreading in Deaf Adults with Cochlear Implants: Evidence for Perceptual Compensation.

Previous research has provided evidence for a speechreading advantage in congenitally deaf adults compared to hearing adults. A 'perceptual compensation' account of this finding proposes that prolonged early onset deafness leads to a greater reliance on visual, as opposed to auditory, information when perceiving speech which in turn results in superior visual speech perception skills in deaf adults. In the current study we tested whether previous demonstrations of a speechreading advantage for profoundly congenitally deaf adults with hearing aids, or no amplificiation, were also apparent in adults with the same deafness profile but who have experienced greater access to the auditory elements of speech via a cochlear implant (CI). We also tested the prediction that, in line with the perceptual compensation account, receiving a CI at a later age is associated with superior speechreading skills due to later implanted individuals having experienced greater dependence on visual speech information. We designed a speechreading task in which participants viewed silent videos of 123 single words spoken by a model and were required to indicate which word they thought had been said via a free text response. We compared congenitally deaf adults who had received CIs in childhood or adolescence (