Perceptual restoration occurs when the brain restores missing segments from speech under certain conditions. It is investigated in the auditory modality, but minimal evidence has been collected during speechreading tasks. The authors measured perceptual restoration in speechreading by individuals with hearing loss and compared it to perceptual…

Purpose: The study was designed primarily to determine if the use of hearing aids (HAs) in individuals with hearing impairment in China would affect their speechreading performance. Method: Sixty-seven young adults with hearing impairment with HAs and 78 young adults with hearing impairment without HAs completed newly developed Chinese…

Despite the body of research on auditory-visual speech perception in infants and schoolchildren, development in the early childhood period remains relatively uncharted. In this study, English-speaking children between three and four years of age were investigated for: (i) the development of visual speech perception--lip-reading and visual…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to explore the audiovisual speech perception strategies.80.23.47 adopted by normal-hearing and deaf people in processing familiar and unfamiliar languages. Our primary hypothesis was that they would adopt different perception strategies due to different sensory experiences at an early age, limitations…

For children who are born deaf, lipreading (speechreading) is an important source of access to spoken language. We used eye tracking to investigate the strategies used by deaf (n = 33) and hearing 5-8-year-olds (n = 59) during a sentence speechreading task. The proportion of time spent looking at the mouth during speech correlated positively with…

Adults use vision to perceive low-fidelity speech; yet how children acquire this ability is not well understood. The literature indicates that children show reduced sensitivity to visual speech from kindergarten to adolescence. We hypothesized that this pattern reflects the effects of complex tasks and a growth period with harder-to-utilize…

Purpose: The effect of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the perception of audiovisual speech in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) was investigated by varying the noise level and the sound intensity of acoustic speech. The main hypotheses were that the McGurk effect (in which incongruent visual speech alters the…

Speakers possess a natural capacity for lip reading; analogous to this, there may be an intuitive ability to "tongue-read." Although the ability of untrained participants to perceive aspects of the speech signal has been explored for some visual representations of the vocal tract (e.g. talking heads), it is not yet known to what extent…

Purpose: The study addressed three research questions: Does lipreading improve between the ages of 7 and 14 years? Does hearing loss affect the development of lipreading? How do individual differences in lipreading relate to other abilities? Method: Forty children with normal hearing (NH) and 24 with hearing loss (HL) were tested using 4…

Background: Previous research has found that newborn infants can match phonetic information in the lips and voice from as young as ten weeks old. There is evidence that access to visual speech is necessary for normal speech development. Although we have an understanding of this early sensitivity, very little research has investigated older…

Twenty normal-hearing, sighted subjects (ages 20-42) viewed soundless videotapes of a speaker reading lists from the two forms of the Utley Lipreading Test and three from Harris' revised Central Institute for the Deaf (CID) Everyday Sentences. Results do not support the interchange of Utley and CID sentences for test-retest comparisons of…

This study examined the effects of speechreading sentence perception across three speaker viewing angles: front view, quarter view, and side view. The performance of a female adult with postlingual hearing loss was measured at each angle. Results indicated that the side view angle was the most effective, though performance at the other angles was…

This preliminary study examined effects of word visibility and prime association factors on visual spoken word recognition in lipreading, using a related/unrelated prime-target paradigm with 20 hearing adults. In related prime-target pairings, more targets with a high than low prime association were identified. In unrelated prime-target pairings,…

The study evaluated the importance to successful lipreading of a specific visual memory for mouth shape sequences in 23 hearing impaired children (11 to 16 years old) and 16 adults. Results suggested the use of sequence-memory training with articulatory shapes for lipreading instruction. (Author/SB)