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

Lipreaders recognize words with phonetically impoverished stimuli, an ability that is generally poor in normal-hearing adults. Individual sentence lipreading trials from 341 young adults were modeled to predict words and phonemes correct in terms of measures of phoneme response dissimilarity (PRD), number of inserted incorrect response phonemes, lipreader gender, and a measure of speech perception in noise. Interactions with lipreaders' gender necessitated structurally different models of males' and females' lipreading. Overall, female lipreaders are more accurate, their ability to recognize words with impoverished or degraded input is consistent across visual and auditory modalities, and they amplify their correct responding through top-down insertion of text. Males' responses suggest that individuals with poorer auditory speech perception in noise amplify their responses by shifting towards including text in their response that is more perceptually discrepant from the stimulus. Attention to gender differences merits attention in future studies that use visual speech stimuli.