Predicting Individual Differences in Lipreading From Eye-Tracking and Pupillometry During Silent Visual Speech

Puneet Kumar, Satyarth Malik, Gao Zheng, Guoying Zhao, Xiaobai Li

Lipreading ability varies widely, including among people who are hard of hearing. Although mouth-directed attention is linked to speechreading outcomes, it remains unclear how much lipreading skill can be inferred from viewing behavior and which signals carry this information. We examine whether individual differences in lipreading ability are reflected in viewing behavior during silent speech and quantify the contributions of gaze dynamics, pupil-linked signals, and spatial viewing allocation. We introduce the Lipreading Perception Study (LiPS) dataset and a tracker-independent preprocessing pipeline that synchronizes SR Research EyeLink gaze and pupil recordings with the stimuli. Twenty-four adults (age 32 $\pm$ 10 years) completed a four-alternative forced-choice silent lipreading task. An extreme-groups protocol yielded 18 participants labeled as stronger or weaker lipreaders. Each participant-trial included four aligned views: lip-region images, frame-level gaze, pupil summaries, and spatial viewing proportions. A four-branch neural network with cross-modal attention predicted labels using participant-disjoint splits and systematic ablations. The full model reached accuracy…