Preparing for communication interactions: The value of anticipatory strategies for adults with hearing impairment

Some people with hearing impairment may use anticipatory strategies to prepare for an upcoming communication interaction, such as a doctor's appointment. They may consider vocabulary and statements that might occur, and they may practice speechreading a partner saying the items. Experiment 1 evaluated the effectiveness of two types of anticipatory strategies: workbook activities and situation-specific lipreading practice. Two groups of normal- hearing subjects were asked to prepare for a communication interaction in a bank setting where they would be required to recognize speech using only the visual signal. Each group was assigned to one type of anticipatory strategy. A third group served as a control group. Experiment 2 evaluated whether multifaceted anticipatory practice improved cochlear implant users' ability to recognize statements and words audiovisually that might occur in a doctor's office, bank, movie theater, and gas station. One group of implanted subjects received 4 days of training, 1 day for each setting, and a second group served as a control group. In both experiments, subjects who used anticipatory strategies did not improve their performance on situation- specific sentence tests more than the control subjects.