Developing a rehabilitation program based on working memoryand its effectiveness on word recognition in children withhearing impairment

Students with hearing impairment have difficulty in reading. The reading process in these people is weak due to the fact that they not only lack inner speech, but also cannot automatically use the rules of matching phonemes with letters. Meanwhile, one of the evolutionary factors involved in the reading process is the memory function. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of the rehabilitation program based on working memory on word recognition in children with hearing impairment.

The method of this research was an experiment with a pre-test and post-test design with a control group and follow-up. The statistical population of the research included all children aged 8 to 13 with hearing impairment (girls and boys) who had hearing aids in Shiraz city in 2023. After screening, the research sample was selected from Khagani Elementary School in Shiraz according to the entry and exit criteria and randomly assigned to two experimental (15 people) and control (15 people) groups. The research tool included the reading and dyslexia test. In order to analyze the data, descriptive statistics including mean and standard deviation were used, and to test the hypotheses, the method of mixed two-way multivariate analysis of variance was used.

The research Results showed that the rehabilitation program based on working memory improved word recognition in children with hearing impairment.

According to the findings of the present study, the rehabilitation program based on working memory is a useful program for improving word recognition in children with hearing impairment.