Speech discrimination and lip reading in patients with word deafness or auditory agnosia

The purpose of this study was to assess the ability of four patients with word deafness or auditory agnosia to discriminate speech by reading lips. The patients were studied using nonsense monosyllables to test for speech discrimination, a lip reading test, the Token Test for auditory comprehension, and the Aphasia test. Our results show that patients with word deafness or auditory agnosia without aphasia can improve speech comprehension by reading lips in combination with listening, as compared with lip reading or listening alone. In conclusion, lip reading was shown to be useful for speech comprehension among these patients.