Objectively Measuring Audiovisual Effects in Noise Using Virtual Human Speakers.
John Kyle Cooper, Jonas Vanthornhout, Astrid van Wieringen and 1 others
PMID 40221967WHAT IT FOUND
Seeing a virtual speaker's lip movements improved speech-in-noise scores and brain responses to the speech in young normal-hearing adults, but the study did not show the benefit grew as noise increased.
Key findings
01Seeing the virtual speaker's lip movements improved behavioral speech-in-noise performance: median SRTs were -5.6 dB for audio-only and -7.3 dB for audiovisual, a 1.7 dB difference (W = 318.5, P = 0.001).
02The EEG-based neural tracking measure also favored audiovisual speech: median reconstruction accuracy was 0.089 for audio-only and 0.120 for audiovisual (W = 122, P = 0.035).
03Lip movements increased neural tracking overall, but the benefit did not significantly change across noise levels (F = 2.230, P = 0.067).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 20 young normal-hearing adults, and 19 of them were female, so it does not show what would happen in older adults, people with hearing loss, or a balanced sample. Participants were tested in a sound booth with a single virtual speaker, not in real conversations with multiple speakers or everyday background noise. The paper's aim included comparing behavioral and electrophysiological measures, but the results do not give a direct correlation test between them. The added benefit of lip movements did not significantly change across noise levels, so the hypothesis that visual cues help more as noise worsens was not supported. The AVATAR mouth movements were programmed only for the LIST sentences, limiting the range of speech material that can be used. The behavioral and EEG tests were done in a fixed order, so practice or fatigue effects could influence the results.
Declared interests
Funding was provided by a Research Foundation Flanders PhD grant, FWO project grant 1SF1324N. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that EEG neural tracking is a clinical test for speech-in-noise understanding or that lip movements help more as noise gets worse. The study tested young normal-hearing adults in a lab and did not find a significant interaction between lip movements and noise level.