Visible Language in Speech Perception: Lipreading and Reading

Abstract

Watching a speaker in face-to-face communication can influence what the perceiver hears the speaker saying. Faced with this influence of visible language on the perception of audible language, an interesting question is whether written language would also influence audible speech perception. To test this possibility, subjects identified spoken syllables either while viewing the speaker's face or while reading a written syllable. In both conditions, subjects identified what they heard the speaker saying. Replicating previous studies, lipreading had a large influence on the identification. In contrast, reading a written syllable had a much smaller, but statistically significant effect. A fuzzy logical model of perception accounted for both the lipreading and reading contributions to speech perception. A model assuming that the reading contribution was due to a post-perceptual bias gave a poor description of the results. Although lipreading appears to be much more influential than reading, it remains a possibility that written language can contribute to our auditory experience of speech.