A Video-Recorded Test of Lipreading for British English

Tests of lipreading are valuable in many applications, particularly with hearing impaired people. Desirable properties of such a test are outlined, and the deficiencies of present tests noted. All the stated criteria are met by a new video recording of the BKB sentence lists. A calibration study with 22 normally-hearing subjects shows that 12 of the 21 lists may be considered equally difficult. Different scoring methods are investigated, including a subjective technique. Correlations among all the scoring methods are high. Practice effects can be large, and vary with lipreading ability. While low scorers show little increase in performance over the set of lists, high scorers show big improvements. Two examples of the test's usefulness are detailed--one from the laboratory and one from the clinic. Both demonstrate that hearing which would not lead to significant speech perception on its own can still greatly improve lipreading ability.