Acoustic and visual confusion in immediate memory in people who are deaf or hard of hearing

A memory task based on the "selective interference" paradigm (Baddeley, Lewis, & Vallar, 1984), presenting both phonetically similar words and visually similar words, was administered to people with normal hearing and people who are deaf or hard of hearing. The task was designed to "overload" selectively various features of the working memory system. The impact of articulatory suppression was minimal on the memory of the subjects who are deaf Their memory performance oil visually similar words was poorer than that of their counterparts with normal hearing. These data suggest that the subjects who are deaf do not depend solely on a phonemic coding strategy and that there is some visual impact on their memory. The interference in the performance of the subjects with normal hearing in articulatory suppression condition seemed consistent with the usage ofa phonentic code.