Effects of talker variability on speechreading

The effects of talker variability on visual speech perception were tested b y having subjects speech-read sentences from either single-talker or mixed- talker sentence lists. Results revealed that changes in talker from trial t o trial decreased speechreading performance. To help determine whether this decrement was due to talker change-and not a change in superficial charact eristics of the stimuli-Experiment 2 tested speechreading from visual stimu li whose images were tinted by a single color, or mixed colors. Results rev ealed that the mixed-color lists did not inhibit speechreading performance relative to the single-color lists. These results are analogous to findings in the auditory speech literature and suggest that, like auditory speech, visual speech operations include a resource-demanding component that is inf luenced by talker variability.