Earlier research has shown that vision can improve the perception of spoken language. The experiment described in this paper was conducted to investigate the nature of information transmitted by eye and ear. We analyzed the data in terms of phonetic distinctive features and the role of the different modalities. A computation method is used to determine relative information transmission values for each phonetic feature. For consonants it appears that vision plays the dominant role in transmitting place of articulation, whereas affrication, nasality, stop and voicing can be best transmitted by ear. For vowels visual dominance is not clear, the auditory channel seems to transmit each feature in a better way.