Speechreading

Speechreading (or lipreading) can be helpful to people with hearing problems as a visual source of information on what is being said. However, people without hearing problems also integrate sensory information in speech perception. In a very noisy room, understanding speech is less difficult when one can also watch the speaker's face. Visual information is provided by the entire face (mouth, tongue, teeth, jaw, eyebrows), hence "speechreading" is a more appropriate term than "lipreading".

Links

• Utrecht Lexicon of Linguistics
• More on speechreading