Response Errors in Females' and Males' Sentence Lipreading Necessitate Structurally Different Models for Predicting...

Area of Science:

• Audiology
• Speech Science
• Psychology

Background:

• Lipreading ability is generally poor in normal-hearing adults.
• Understanding factors influencing lipreading accuracy is crucial for communication research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To model and predict word and phoneme recognition in lipreading.
• To investigate the influence of phoneme response dissimilarity, inserted phonemes, gender, and speech-to-noise ratio on lipreading performance.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of 341 young adults' individual sentence lipreading trials.
• Development of gender-specific models to account for interactions between lipreading performance and gender.
• Inclusion of measures for phoneme response dissimilarity (PRD) and speech perception in noise.

Main Results:

• Female lipreaders demonstrated higher accuracy and consistent performance across visual and auditory degraded input.
• Females amplified correct responses by incorporating text-based information.
• Males with poorer auditory speech perception in noise showed increased reliance on perceptually discrepant text insertions.

Conclusions:

• Gender significantly impacts lipreading strategies and performance.
• Distinct models are required for male and female lipreaders.
• Future research on visual speech stimuli should consider gender differences.