Visual speech fills in both discrimination and identification of non-intact auditory speech in children.

The children were typically developing and had normal hearing, vision, articulation, word recognition, visual perception, and vocabulary, so the findings do not show how children with hearing loss or speech-language disorders would respond. The study used specially edited nonwords and syllables with removed consonant onsets, not everyday speech or a tested therapy, so it cannot be read as a clinical intervention result. The /g/ benefit was small or absent, and confidence intervals were close to zero, so visual speech should not be treated as a reliable cue for all consonants. The association between the visual speech benefit for discrimination and receptive vocabulary was correlational and shared only about 3% to 4% of variance, so it does not show that visual speech causes better word learning. Children disliked the discrimination task, and no feedback was given, so task demands and motivation may have influenced performance.

The supplied text does not include a conflicts-of-interest declaration. The paper is tagged as supported by NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research support.

Do not conclude that showing children the talker's mouth will improve speech or language therapy. The study tested perception of edited nonwords in typically developing children, and the clear benefit was only for easy-to-speechread /b/ sounds.