The Relationship between Two Visual Communication Systems

To explore the relationship between reading and lipreading and to determine whether readers and lipreaders use similar strategies to comprehend verbal messages, 60 female junior and sophomore high school students--30 good and 30 poor readers--were given a filmed lipreading test, a test to measure eye-voice span, a test of cloze ability, and a test of their ability to comprehend printed material presented one word at a time in the absence of an opportunity to regress or scan ahead. The results of this study indicated that (a) there is a significant relationship between reading and lipreading ability; (b) although good readers may be either good or poor lipreaders, poor readers are more likely to be poor than good lipreaders; (c) there are similarities in the strategies used by readers and lipreaders in their approach to comprehending spoken and written material; (d) word-by-word reading of continuous prose appears to be a salient characteristic of both poor reading and poor lipreading ability; and (c) good readers and lipreaders do not engage in word-by-word reading but rather use a combination of visual and linguistic cues to interpret written and spoken messages.