LAUSR

OBJECTIVES Recognizing speech through telecommunication can be challenging in unfavorable listening conditions. Text supplementation or provision of facial cues can facilitate speech recognition under some circumstances. However, our understanding of the combined benefit of text and facial cues in telecommunication is limited. The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential benefit of text supplementation for sentence recognition scores and subjective ratings of spoken speech with and without facial cues available. DESIGN Twenty adult females (M = 24 years, range 21 to 29 years) with normal hearing performed a sentence recognition task and also completed a subjective rating questionnaire in 24 conditions. The conditions varied by integrity of the available facial cues (clear facial cues, slight distortion facial cues, great distortion facial cues, no facial cues), signal-to-noise ratio (quiet, +1 dB, -3 dB), and text availability (with text, without text). When present, the text was an 86 to 88% accurate transcription of the auditory signal presented at a 500 ms delay relative to the auditory signal. RESULTS The benefits of text supplementation were largest when facial cues were not available and when the signal-to-noise ratio was unfavorable. Although no recognition score benefit was present in quiet, recognition benefit was significant in all levels of background noise for all levels of facial cue integrity. Moreover, participant subjective ratings of text benefit were robust and present even in the absence of recognition benefit. Consistent with previous literature, facial cues were beneficial for sentence recognition scores in the most unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio, even when greatly distorted. It is interesting that, although all levels of facial cues were beneficial for recognition scores, participants rated a significant benefit only with clear facial cues. CONCLUSIONS The benefit of text for auditory-only and auditory-visual speech recognition is evident in recognition scores and subjective ratings; the benefit is larger and more robust for subjective ratings than for scores. Therefore, text supplementation might provide benefit that extends beyond speech recognition scores. Combined, these findings support the use of text supplementation in telecommunication, even when facial cues are concurrently present, such as during teleconferencing or watching television.