Charles S. Watson
William W. Qiu
Mary Chamberlain
Dept. of Speech and Hear. Sci., Indiana Univ., Bloomington, IN 47405
Two experiments were run to determine whether the individual differences in auditory speech processing are predictable from those in speechreading, using a total of 90 normal-hearing subjects. Tests included single words and sentences. The speech was recorded on a video disk by a male actor (Bernstein and Eberhardt, 1986, Johns Hopkins Lipreading Corpus). The auditory speech was presented with a white noise masker, at -7 dB Sp/N. The correlations between overall auditory and visual performance were 0.52 and 0.45, in the two studies, suggesting the existence of a modality-independent ability to perceive linguistic ``wholes'' on the basis of linguistic fragments. Subjects also identified printed sentences with 40%--60% of the portions of the letters deleted. Performance on that ``visual-fragments'' test also correlated significantly with visual and auditory speech processing. [Work supported by AFOSR, through a grant to the Institute for the Study of Human Capabilities.]