Visual and Auditory Sequence Learning in Hearing-Impaired Children

Two hearing impaired groups, one diagnosed as deaf, the other as aphasic, at two age levels, CA 6–7 and CA 10–11, with 8 subjects in each group, were compared to a control hearing group of 16 subjects at each age level. All subjects were given four paired-associate tasks: a visual discrete task with six associations (DPA) and three 2- to 6-sequence tasks with combinatory sequences as stimuli; one sequence task showed visual stimuli in simultaneous presentation (SIM), another in successive (SUC), and a third presented auditory successive sequences (AUD). The main results indicated no differences between aphasic and deaf except that the younger aphasics were poorer on AUD. The younger hearing-impaired were equal to controls on DPA, but poorer on SUC and AUD. For all groups SIM and for controls also AUD was easier than SUC.