Seeing a Talker's Mouth Reduces the Effort of Perceiving Speech and Repairing Perceptual Mistakes for Listeners With Cochlear Implants.

The study used quiet, slow, clearly spoken sentences with enough context to repair a missing word, so it may not represent noisy everyday listening. The talker's mouth was blurred rather than fully hidden, so non-mouth facial cues were still available. Pupil size was analyzed only on trials with correct repetition, so effort on failed trials was not included. Typical-hearing listeners made very few errors, so the task could not show a large visual benefit for them. The CI sample was small and mixed, with bilateral, unilateral, and bimodal users, so individual device configuration may matter. The study measured lab effort and errors, not long-term communication participation or a clinical treatment outcome.

The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The work was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Do not conclude that seeing the mouth is a proven clinical treatment for CI users. The study measured pupil effort and errors during quiet, controlled sentences, not everyday communication outcomes.