Background: Speech perception is often considered specific to the auditory modality, despite convincing evidence that speech processing is bimodal. The theoretical and clinical roles of speech-reading for speech perception, however, have received little attention in speech-language therapy. Aims: The role of speech-read information for speech…

Three methods by which hearing adults process speechread information are discussed: selective adaptation, immediate memory, and repetition priming. Also discussed are mental representations of speech by hearing-impaired and hearing children, infants' responses to speechread stimuli compared to other stimuli, infants' speechreading of a foreign…

The paper presents four research projects in process in the Communication Sciences Laboratory at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. These projects illustrate four broad areas of research on the relationships between higher order information processing systems and the communication skills and problems exhibited by deaf people. (Author)

Reviews research on prosody and segmental perception, segmentation and invariance, categorical perception of speech and nonspeech, feature detectors, scaling speech sounds to an auditory-articulatory space, acoustic-phonetic dependencies within the syllable, higher order (nonphonetic) factors in the comprehension of fluent speech, and cerebral…