Association between vision and speech perception (Liu et al., 2025)

Objective: This study aimed to explore the relationship between visual acuity and speech recognition.

Method: The study subjects finally included 30 patients aged over 60 years who were treated in our hospital (20 cases in the observation group and 10 cases in the control group). The general information, vision, pure-tone average (PTA), and speech recognition percentage (SRP) were recorded for analysis. All subjects in the observational group underwent binocular cataract surgery, and the PTA was measured before surgery, with SRP measured before surgery and 1 month after surgery. The subjects in the control group had their PTA and SRP measured, and their SRP was measured again 1 month later.

Results: One month after surgery, the SRP of the observation group was higher than that before surgery (p < .001). Multivariate regression analysis found that visual acuity was associated with SRP (β = .13, 95% confidence interval [0.05, 0.22], p = .006). Restricted cubic spline analysis revealed a linear association between visual acuity and SRP (p for nonlinear = .084), with an inflection point of about 0.5 (decimal vision). When visual acuity was ≥ 0.5, the SRP increased by 53.0% for every 1-LogMAR unit decrease in visual acuity (p = .020).

Conclusions: Our study found that visual acuity is positively correlated with SRP. Older adults with reversible vision loss and mild-to-severe age-related hearing loss can improve their speech perception through vision recovery treatment.

Supplemental Material S1. Lip movement of the speaker and information about paired research subjects.

Supplemental Material S2. Baseline characteristics comparison between study completers and non-completers.

Liu, Y., Ma, T., Ye, Z., & Li, Z. (2025). The power of vision on speech recognition among older people. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_JSLHR-24-00798