Seeing is Hearing
We all know that in a crowded or noisy setting, we can hear what someone is saying to us better if we can see their face. To some extent we all lip-read in that we can associate mouth movements with words as an aid to understanding speech.
But UC Riverside psychology Professor, Lawrence D. Rosenblum, and graduate students, Rachel M. Miller and Kauyumari Sanchez, have done research that indicates that studying someone’s face while they are speaking - even without sound - will help us hear them later.
The study involved 60 undergraduate students who were asked to lip-read sentences from a silent video of a speaker’s face. The students had no former experience lip-reading.
Students then listened to an audio of speakers against a lot of background noise. Half listened to a tape with the speaker they had just viewed and the other half listened to a tape of a new speaker. They were asked to identify as many words as possible from the sentences. The students who heard sentences from the speaker they had just spent an hour watching and trying to lip-read, were better able to identify more words from the noisy audio.
These findings suggest that when we watch a person speak, we become familiar with characteristics of their speaking style which also are present in the sound of their speech. This allows talker familiarity to be transferred from lip reading to listening, thereby making a talker easier to hear. These results have implications for individuals with hearing impairments as well as for brain lesion patients, Rosenblum said.
