Programmed Instruction of Hearing-Impaired Children in the Auditory Discrimination of Vowels

Abstract

Programmed instruction in auditory vowel discrimination was given to eight children, five-to-eleven years old, with severe hearing impairment. All children showed steady increases in the rate of learning over four series of discriminations and in later training on the original series. However, there was no transfer of the learned vowel discriminations to a word-recognition task incorporating some of the same words used in training. The need to develop instructional programs for teaching children to acquire and generalize verbal discrimination skills is discussed.