Experience seeing a person's face also makes it easier to hear them, according to research conducted by Lawrence D. Rosenblum, PhD, professor of psychology at UC Riverside, and graduate students Rachel M. Miller and Kauyumari Sanchez.

In the study, 60 college undergraduates were asked to lip-read sentences from a silent videotape of a talker's face. These subjects all had normal hearing and vision and had no formal lip reading experience.

After an hour of lip-reading, the students were asked to listen to sentences heard against a background of noise and to identify as many words as they could. the undergraduates who lip=read and heard speech from the same talker were better at identifying the noisy sentences than those who lip-read from one talker and heard speech from another.

These findings suggest that when we watch a person speak, we become familiar with characteristics of their speaking style, allowing talker familiarity to be transferred from lip-reading to listening. Dr. Rosenblum's paper, "Lip-Read Me Now, Hear Me Better Later: Crossmodal Transfer of Talker Familiarity Effects," appeared in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science.