Measurement of Visual Speech Comprehension

This study was designed to standardize the measurement of visual speech comprehension in order to facilitate the evaluation of a patient’s communication handicap, his basic capacity for lipreading and the benefit received through lipreading training as a clinical tool. To this end, a silent color film of four minutes' duration was used to obtain a standardized measurement of the lipreading ability of 1108 hearing-impaired subjects. The film depicts an everyday situation in which two persons, while having coffee together, speak nine sentences of varying difficulty. Item analysis reveals good consistency, and the score obtained by the individual patient corresponds well with the clinical evaluation of his lipreading ability.