Visual Bias for Speech Perception in Age-Related Hearing Loss: An Eye-Tracking Study

Hearing loss degrades auditory speech signals, which may lead to a compensatory bias toward visual processing during audiovisual speech perception. Visual bias could result from cross-modal reorganization, where auditory neurons are repurposed to support visual perception, or from a chronic reliance on the visual modality to resolve degraded auditory perception. Here, we test how visual bias in hearing loss is affected by background noise and how visual attention plays a role. Participants completed a task requiring them to identify if a visual word preceding an auditory word (or the reverse of this order) matched while eye fixations were recorded. Contrary to our expectations, task accuracy and eye fixation to facial features (i.e., mouth and eyes) did not differ depending on hearing ability. These findings suggest that partial hearing loss, as seen in aging, may not accompany a bias toward visual information for words.