A study by Susan Ebbels (2000) showed that it was possible to use the Stackhouse & Wells (1997) psycholinguistic framework to plan and interpret an investigation of a hearing-impaired child's speech processing skills in order to determine points of breakdown and so inform therapy. The first aim of this study was to examine the speech processing abilities of a ten year old hearing-impaired boy with speech difficulties using the Stackhouse & Wells (1997) psycholinguistic framework. The subject chosen had literacy difficulties that did not seem to be wholly accounted for by his hearing loss. This led to the study's second aim of using a psycholinguistic hypothesis-led approach to investigate and determine the reasons for the additional literacy difficulties of a hearing-impaired child. Thus the study used a psycholinguistic approach to identify the root of speech processing and literacy difficulties experienced by a hearing-impaired child. It was found that, despite his hearing impairment and output difficulties for certain consonant clusters, the subject's speech production was not affected by poor auditory discrimination or phonological representations, but that he had faulty motor programmes for some words, in line with the phenomenon of 'frozen phonology'. An exploration of the reasons for his literacy difficulties uncovered phonological awareness difficulties, particularly with blending and segmenting of words and found that his knowledge of the letter-to-sound relationship for vowels was extremely poor. A set of picture/word/sound colour cards was used to teach the sounds associated with a set of vowels, as suggested by Broomfield and Combley (2003). One teaching session was found to improve the subject's ability to correctly read the vowels taught, thus demonstrating his potential to acquire this skill
