Influence of speech-in-noise perception, gender, and age on lipreading ability for monosyllabic words

• Lipreading for monosyllabic words is better for women • Lipreading for monosyllabic words declines with age • Decline of lipreading with age depends on speech-in-noise perception • Conclusions differ depending on viseme, phoneme, or word-level analysis Lipreading is an important function that supports speech perception in people with communication difficulties, and there is recent interest in the development of lipreading training programs as a strategy to rehabilitate their speech perception. However, the success of these programs is mixed, potentially owing to individual differences in participant characteristics. Here, we conducted an online cross-sectional study to examine the effects of speech-in-noise perception, gender, and age on lipreading performance. Forty participants aged 41–75 years viewed short, silent video clips of a woman speaking a monosyllabic word and typed the word they perceived into a response box. Additionally, we collected demographic information and speech-in-noise perception scores. Lipreading performance was scored at the word level (lexical level) and at sublexical levels for individual phonemes and visually identical homophemes (visemes) of the target words. Women correctly reported more phonemes and visemes per word than men, but no gender effect was found at the whole-word level. There was an interaction between age and speech-in-noise ability for both words and phonemes: Lipreading performance was best for comparatively younger participants with worse speech-in-noise performance, but this effect was not found in older participants and those with better speech-in-noise perception. This implies evidence for a compensatory reliance on visual speech when speech-in-noise perception is low, which may decline with age. Overall, our results suggest that gender, age, and speech-in-noise perception shape lipreading ability, although the effects may differ depending on the analysis at lexical and sublexical levels.