Classon, E. , Rudner, M. & Rönnberg, J.
Linnaeus Centre HEAD, The Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning. Linköping University. Linköping, Sweden.
Post-lingually acquired hearing impairment is associated with decreasing phonological processing abilities. This study aimed to examine whether working memory capacity (WMC) compensates for this effect. Individuals with acquired hearing impairment (HI) and with normal hearing (NH) performed a visually presented rhyme judgment task in four conditions. Word pairs consisted of rhymes (R+) and non-rhymes (R-) that were orthographically similar (O+) or dissimilar (O-). The groups were matched on age, education level, WMC and verbal as well as non-verbal abilities. Each group was subdivided into high- and low-WMC individuals by a median split of reading span scores. In agreement with earlier studies NH performed significantly better than HI. Further, high-WMC individuals performed better than low-WMC individuals and this effect interacted with group and condition. Specifically, WMC had an impact on the performance of HI, but not NH. HI with high WMC performed on a par with persons with normal hearing. In contrast, HI with low WMC made significantly fewer correct judgments than HI with high WMC and NH with high or low WMC in the phonologically most demanding conditions (R+O-, R-O+). Results thus indicate good WMC can compensate for hearing related phonological processing deficit.