The role of visual speech cues in reducing energetic and informational masking

Two experiments compared the effect of supplying visual speech information (e.g., lipreading cues) on the ability to hear one female talker's voice in the presence of steady-state noise or a masking complex consisting of two other female voices. In the first experiment intelligibility of sentences was measured in the presence of the two types of maskers with and without perceived spatial separation of target and masker. The second study tested detection of sentences in the same experimental conditions. Results showed that visual cues provided more benefit for both recognition and detection of speech when the masker consisted of other voices (versus steady-state noise). Moreover, visual cues provided greater benefit when the target speech and masker were spatially coincident versus when they appeared to arise from different spatial locations. The data obtained here are consistent with the hypothesis that lipreading cues help to segregate a target voice from competing voices, in addition to the established benefit of supplementing masked phonetic information.