An investigation of spontaneous eye blinks during lipreading

The role of spontaneous eye blinks was investigated for a lipreading task involving a videotaped recording of 20 sentences and a 948-word passage. Blinks were recorded electro-oculographically on one channel of a chart recorder while the audio correlate of the visual message was recorded simultaneously on the second channel. A comparison of the two records indicated that blink suppression occurred while the subjects lipread compared to times when no visual information was presented. The data also show that (a) subjects tended to blink during the visual pauses that occurred while the passage was being presented and (b) better lipreaders blinked less frequently than did poorer lipreaders. These results are examined in relation to the hypothesis that attention and blink rate are inversely related.