A comparison of audiovisual and auditory-only training on the perception of spectrally-distorted speech

Recent research suggests that using visual speech in auditory training can improve auditory-only speech perception. The long term aim of our work is to investigate this approach for hearing-impaired users, in particular cochlear-implant users. In the pilot study presented in this paper, we use spectrally-distorted speech to train two different groups of normal hearing subjects: native English and non-native, English-speaking Saudi listeners. Our pilot study suggests that both groups attain similar improvement in audio-only speech perception when visual speech is introduced into the training process. This may provide evidence that cochlear implant users would benefit from introducing visual speech in training, given that the reduced processing abilities of non-native listeners for native speech could be compared to the reduced processing abilities of cochlear implant users as a result of the inherent noise in the processing of sound by a cochlear implant.