Want to quickly adapt to distorted speech and become a better listener? Read lips, not text

Abstract

When listening to distorted speech, does one become a better listener by looking at the face of the speaker or by reading subtitles that are presented along with the speech signal? We examined this question in two experiments in which we presented participants with spectrally distorted speech (4-channel noise-vocoded speech). During short training sessions, listeners received auditorily distorted words or pseudowords that were partially disambiguated by concurrently presented lipread information or text. After each training session, listeners were tested with new degraded auditory words. Learning effects (based on proportions of correctly identified words) were stronger if listeners had trained with words rather than with pseudowords (a lexical boost), and adding lipread information during training was more effective than adding text (a lipread boost). Moreover, the advantage of lipread speech over text training was also found when participants were tested more than a month later. The current results thus suggest that lipread speech may have surprisingly long-lasting effects on adaptation to distorted speech.

Repeatedly experiencing the McGurk effect induces long-lasting changes in auditory speech perception

“…Our results clarify that FIR, if induced appropriately, can persist over timescales even longer than those described for LGP. A recent comparison between the benefits of visual speech and written text in understanding degraded auditory speech showed that visual speech provided a greater benefit than written speech, and this benefit persisted for more than a month, supporting the idea of a longlasting influence of visual speech on auditory speech perception 44 .…”