Département de Psychologie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Int J Audiol. 2010 Dec;49(12):904-11. doi: 10.3109/14992027.2010.509112. Epub 2010 Sep 27.
Speech understanding is improved when the observer can both see and hear the talker. This study compared the effects of reduced visual acuity on auditory-visual (AV) speech-recognition in noise among younger and older adults. Two groups of participants performed a closed-set sentence-recognition task in one auditory-alone (A-alone) condition and under three AV conditions: normal visual acuity (6/6), and with blurred vision to simulate a 6/30 and 6/60 visual impairment. The results showed that (1) the addition of visual speech cues improved speech-perception relative to the A-alone condition, (2) under the AV conditions, performance declined as the amount of blurring increased, (3) even under the AV condition that simulated a visual acuity of 6/60, the speech recognition scores were significantly higher than those obtained under the A-alone condition, and (4) generally, younger adults obtained higher scores than older adults under all conditions. Our results demonstrate the benefits of visual cues to enhance speech understanding even when visual acuity is not optimal.
当观察者既能看到又能听到说话者时，言语理解能力会提高。本研究比较了不同年龄段人群在听力正常和三种视听条件下（正常视力（6/6）、模拟 6/30 和 6/60 视力障碍的模糊视力），视力下降对听觉-视觉（AV）语音识别在噪声中的影响。两组参与者在一种听觉条件（A -alone）和三种视听条件下执行了一项封闭式句子识别任务：正常视力（6/6），以及模拟 6/30 和 6/60 视力障碍的模糊视力。结果表明：（1）添加视觉语音提示相对于 A-alone 条件提高了语音感知；（2）在视听条件下，随着模糊程度的增加，表现会下降；（3）即使在模拟视力为 6/60 的视听条件下，语音识别得分也明显高于 A-alone 条件下的得分；（4）通常情况下，在所有条件下，年轻成年人的得分都高于老年人。我们的研究结果表明，即使在视力不佳的情况下，视觉提示也能增强语音理解能力。
