Visual Discrimination of Consonants

Abstract

Consonant differentiation by speechreading was determined for full-face and lips-only exposures utilizing two forms of a closed-set response test. Thirty-two female college students viewed a videotaped recording of a male talker under the two exposure conditions. Consonant discrimination was more accurate when subjects viewed the talker’s entire face than when they viewed only his lips. The two test forms were not equivalent in visual intelligibility and initial consonants were more accurately discriminated visually than final consonants. These factors should be considered in research or diagnostic use of CVC monosyllables in the measurement of visual consonant discrimination.