To explore the relationship between reading and lipreading and to determine whether readers and lipreaders use similar strategies to comprehend verbal messages, 60 female junior and sophomore high school students--30 good and 30 poor readers--were given a filmed lipreading test, a test to measure eye-voice span, a test of cloze ability, and a test of their ability to comprehend printed material presented one word at a time in the absence of an opportunity to regress or scan ahead. The results of this study indicated that (a) there is a significant relationship between reading and lipreading ability; (b) although good readers may be either good or poor lipreaders, poor readers are more likely to be poor than good lipreaders; (c) there are similarities in the strategies used by readers and lipreaders in their approach to comprehending spoken and written material; (d) word-by-word reading of continuous prose appears to be a salient characteristic of both poor reading and poor lipreading ability; and (c) good readers and lipreaders do not engage in word-by-word reading but rather use a combination of visual and linguistic cues to interpret written and spoken messages.