Visual input is crucial for understanding speech under noisy conditions, but there are hardly any tools to assess the individual ability to lip read. With this study, we wanted to (1) investigate how linguistic characteristics of language on the one hand and hearing impairment on the other hand have an impact on lip reading abilities and (2) provide a tool to assess lip reading abilities for German speakers. 170 participants (22 prelingually deaf) completed the online assessment, which consisted of a subjective hearing impairment scale and silent videos in which different item categories (numbers, words, and sentences) were spoken and the task for our participants was to recognize the spoken stimuli just by visual inspection. We used different versions of one test and investigated the impact of item categories, word frequency in the spoken language, articulation, sentence frequency in the spoken language, sentence length, and differences between speakers on the recognition score. We found an effect of item categories, articulation, sentence frequency, and sentence length on the recognition score, but no effect of word frequency or version of the test. With respect to hearing impairment we found that higher subjective hearing impairment is associated with higher test score. We did not find any evidence that prelingually deaf individuals show enhanced lip reading skills over people with postlingual acquired hearing impairment. However, we see an effect of education on enhanced lip reading skills only in the prelingual deaf, but not in the population with postlingual acquired hearing loss. This points to the fact that there are different factors contributing to enhanced lip reading abilities depending on the onset of hearing impairment. Overall, lip reading skills vary strongly in the general population independent of hearing impairment. Based on our findings we constructed a new and efficient lipreading assessment tool (SaLT) that can be used to test behavioural lip reading abilities in the German speaking population.