Individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD) may experience, besides reading problems, other speech‐related processing deficits. Here, we examined the influence of visual articulatory information (lip‐read speech) at various levels of background noise on auditory word recognition in children and adults with DD. We found that children with a documented history of DD have deficits in their ability to gain benefit from lip‐read information that disambiguates noise‐masked speech. We show with another group of adult individuals with DD that these deficits persist into adulthood. These deficits could not be attributed to impairments in unisensory auditory word recognition. Rather, the results indicate a specific deficit in audio‐visual speech processing and suggest that impaired multisensory integration might be an important aspect of DD. Individuals with developmental dyslexia benefited substantially less than subjects with typical development from lip‐read information that disambiguates noise‐masked speech, regardless of age and SNR. These results indicate a specific deficit in audio‐visual word recognition in our sample of individuals with dyslexia and suggest that impaired multisensory integration might be an important aspect of developmental dyslexia.