Hearing by eye II : advances in the psychology of speechreading and auditory-visual speech

This volume outlines some of the developments in practical and theoretical research into speechreading lipreading that have taken place since the publication of the original Hearing by Eye. It comprises 15 chapters by international researchers in psychology, psycholinguistics, experimental and clinical speech science, and computer engineering. It answers theoretical questions what are the mechanisms by which heard and seen speech combine? and practical ones what makes a good speechreader? Can machines be programmed to recognize seen and seen-and-heard speech?. The book is written in a non-technical way and starts to articulate a behaviourally-based but cross-disciplinary programme of research in understanding how natural language can be delivered by different modalities. It is ten years since Dodd and Campbell published a book with the title Hearing By Eye. That was the first volume that considered speechreading (lipreading as it was then called) as a psychological process of interest beyond its direct applications in hearing loss and deafness. It has remained the acknowledged title in its field. Since then, practical and theoretical research in this area has expanded hugely and the present volume outlines some of these developments. The book comprises fifteen invited chapters by leading international researchers in psychology, psycholinguistics, experimental and clinical speech science and computer engineering. It gives intriguing answers to theoretical questions (what are the mechanisms by which heard and seen speech combine?) and practical ones (what makes a good speechreader? Can machines be programmed to recognize seen, and seen-and-heard speech?) The book is written in a non-technical way and starts to articulate a behaviorally-based but cross-disciplinary program of research in understanding how natural language can be delivered by different modalities. It has been well-documented that visual information from a talker's mouth and face play a role in the perception and understanding of spoken language (for reviews, see Summerfield, 1987; Massaro, 1987).