Adults benefit more from visual speech in speech maskers than in noise maskers because visual speech helps perceptually isolate target talkers from competing talkers. To investigate whether children use visual speech to perceptually isolate target talkers, this study compared children's speech recognition thresholds in auditory and audiovisual condition across two maskers: two-talker speech and noise. Children demonstrated similar audiovisual benefit in both maskers. Individual differences in speechreading accuracy predicted audiovisual benefit in each masker to a similar degree. Results suggest that although visual speech improves children's masked speech recognition thresholds, children may use visual speech in different ways than adults.

Adults use visual speech to help perceptually group talkers into separate objects and to attend to the target talker. As a result, they benefit more from visual speech in the presence of a two-talker speech masker than in speech-spectrum noise and benefit less from visual speech when other cues are available to support auditory grouping. Recent studies demonstrated that children’s visual speech benefit was similar for a noise masker and a two-talker speech masker, suggesting that children may not use visual speech as a grouping cue. The current study further examined whether children use visual speech as a grouping cue by testing whether 40 seven- to nine-year-old children’s visual speech benefit decreased in the presence of other cues known to promote auditory grouping in children, namely carrier phrases and perceived spatial separation. Children completed an adaptive closed-set speech recognition task in a two-talker speech masker, in auditory-only and audiovisual conditions, and in the presence or absence of one of the auditory grouping cues. Preliminary analyses suggest that children’s visual speech benefit did not decrease when other auditory grouping cues were present. These results provide converging evidence that children in this age range may not use visual speech as a grouping cue.