Visual speech cues improve children's processing speed in both quiet and noise

![CDATA[The presence of visual cues can facilitate speech processing in adults, conferring an ‘audiovisual (AV) benefit’ in noisy listening conditions. However, it is unclear to what extent such benefits extend to quiet conditions and to children. A phoneme monitoring task was used to determine whether 7-11 year-old children show an AV benefit for accuracy and/or speed of processing in either quiet or noise, and whether the magnitude of this benefit differs between listening conditions. An AV benefit for processing speed was found, unaffected by listening conditions. This suggests that visual speech cues can be used by children to facilitate speech processing generally, not just in noise. We therefore believe that visual speech cues may be used to assist children to rapidly process speech in everyday situations.]]