Purpose The study was designed primarily to determine if the use of
hearing aids (HAs) in individuals with
hearing impairment in China would affect their
speechreading performance. Method Sixty-seven young adults with
hearing impairment with HAs and 78 young adults with
hearing impairment without HAs completed newly developed Chinese
speechreading tests targeting 3 linguistic levels (i.e., words, phrases, and sentences). Results Groups with HAs were more accurate at
speechreading than groups without HA across the 3 linguistic levels. For both groups,
speechreading accuracy was higher for phrases than words and sentences, and
speechreading speed was slower for sentences than words and phrases. Furthermore, there was a positive correlation between years of HA use and the accuracy of
speechreading performance; longer HA use was associated with more accurate
speechreading. Conclusions Young HA users in China have enhanced
speechreading performance over their peers with
hearing impairment who are not HA users. This result argues against the perceptual dependence hypothesis that suggests greater dependence on visual information leads to improvement in visual speech perception.