The ease of recognizing spoken words on the basis of optical input alone, or speechreading, is known to systematically vary as a function of the properties of the stimulus materials. The current study investigated the relationship between cortical responses and the intelligibility of the stimulus materials. Open‐set identification performance outside the magnet was used to directly measure the intelligibility of the stimulus materials presented in the magnet as well as participant speechreading ability. fMRI was used to measure cortical response to viewing spoken word stimuli that were predicted to vary in their ease of identification. Videos of spoken words were contrasted with still face images in a block‐design fMRI experiment. Blocks containing sets of words predicted to be easy speechread were contrasted with blocks predicted to be difficult to speechread. Preliminary analyses of cortical response to speechreading are consistent with previous studies [Hall et al., J. Cog. Neuro. 17(6), 939–953 (2005)]. Furthermore, evidence of increased activation in BA 37 and BA 44 for easy words versus hard words was obtained. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that specific areas are sensitive to the intelligibility of speech read stimuli. [Work supported by a grant from NIH/NIDCD (R01DC04856).]