As the world of telecommunications moves towards the possibility of providing images along with sound in the form of videophones, the need arises to establish the ways in which an image may be able to enhance the communicative effectiveness of the users. The authors briefly summarise work carried out in the field and describe three experiments aimed at assessing the contribution of images to speech intelligibility. The first experiment dealt with connected speech masked by noise, the second dealt with the discrimination of single words from similarly sounding words, and the third dealt with the comprehension of information intense connected speech. The conclusions drawn are that an image does indeed have a part to play, but that the benefits are dependent on the sufficiency of the speech information and the way it is presented