Lip Reading and How to Make It Work Better
by Margie Littell Ulrich, CCC-A, Clinical Audiologist

When our ears begin to transmit an unclear speech signal to our brains, our eyes kick in with a back up system called lip reading. Even people with normal hearing will use this technique when they find themselves in difficult listening environments; such as, after church in the foyer, or in a gymnasium during a basketball game. However, eyes have several disadvantages when they try to help us hear. 

First of all, eyes are directional. They have to turn, look, and focus on the face of the person speaking before they can help. When you don't perceive a speech signal from your ears, you may not turn to let your eyes assist you.

Secondly, lip reading is difficult, especially in the English language where 75% of oral English is invisible on the mouth. When we have hearing loss, we often believe people are "swallowing their words", or mumbling. Partly, because of the distortion from the hearing loss and partly because most of English speech sounds occur in the back of the mouth.

Lip reading requires a deep knowledge of the language and a good alertness to communication situations. But it is still difficult. For example, the sentence, "I met Mr. Jones yesterday." as seen on the lips has forty billion matches with other speech sounds in those words! 

If a person with hearing loss is an unusually good lip reader and is exposed to a series of one hundred spoken syllables consisting of a consonant followed by a vowel such as: na, wi, se, mu, , he or she will likely only identify correctly 20 to 25 percent of the syllables. Therefore, the lip reading skill is primarily a process of recognizing patterns of words and phrases rather than just individual sounds or syllables. The better name is "speech reading".

Let's re-examine the sentence: "I met Mr. Jones yesterday". The word "I" is easy to lip read. But the word "met" is one of 48 words that look almost exactly alike on the lips. No lip reader will know what the second word is until he/she sees the last word in the sentence "yesterday"! If the last words in the sentence are "five dollars", the word "met" changes to "bet" which looks identical on the mouth.

"Lipreading is a process in which the ambiguous patterns of the lip movements are recognized because they occur only in patterns dictated by the common usage of the language", according to Dr. Orin Cornett of Gallaudet University. No one can lipread a language they do not know.

The most important thing to keep in mind about lipreading is that it requires a prior knowledge of VERBAL language. A knowledge of written English is of some help in lipreading; but because oral English is so different from written English, written English knowledge is not enough.

In 1966, Dr. Cornett invented a lip reading aid called CUED SPEECH to help deaf children learn to read better. Cued Speech is a sound-based visual communication system which uses eight hand shapes in four different locations ( or "cues") in combination with the natural mouth movements of speech, to make all the indistinct sounds of spoken language look different. It is not a sign language where ideas and words are communicated. Cueing is a process of manipulating hand shapes, hand placements, and non-manual signals to produce a visible code representing the same building blocks which the mouth uses to assemble words. The blocks are assembled by way of the stream of cues produced by these manipulations. It allows a deaf or hard of hearing person see all the speech sounds that a normal hearing person can hear. Because cueing is the visible counterpart of speaking, cued language is the visible counterpart of spoken language. A good video demonstration of Cued Speech can be found online at: http://web7.mit.edu/CuedSpeech/demo.html.
The National Association of Cued Speech can be accessed at: http://www.cuedspeech.org.

Cued Speech is simple in method, but takes practice to become proficient. It requires the person doing to cueing to speak at the same time. The learning task is similar to learning to type. The more practice is done; the more automatic the process. It has helped deaf children learn to speak and read and is largely responsible for many deaf children reaching oral English proficiency.

It may be a good tool for the late deafened adult with poor speech discrimination. Family members can cue when they are speaking to allow the person with the hearing loss to accurately lip read the message being spoken. It can be learned in about 20 hours of instruction; but it takes a bit longer to become proficient. There is an on-line course in Cued Speech at 
http://www.cuedspeech.com.

Other resources to help with the lipreading task is a 6 video tape series READ MY LIPS from the A.G. BELL Association for the Deaf. This series takes you from reading basic words through complex phrases and sentences in a variety of real life situations. One thousand two hundred and eighty items are presented in over 120 subjects by 40 actors and actresses with varied facial characteristics. An instructional handbook and scoring papers to help map your progress are available with the series. A.G. Bell Association for the Deaf has another 11 tape video series which was produced by NTID entitled," NTID SpeechReading series. These videos may be accessed at http://www.agbell.org or 3417 Volta Place, N.W., Washington, DC 20007-2778 phone numbers: 202/337-5220 (Voice) 202/337-5221 (TTY) 202/337-8314 (Fax)

Gene Wilder lends his unique brand of humor to several of the skits throughout a 2 volume series: I SEE WHAT YOU ARE SAYING: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO SPEECHREADING. This series is designed to teach speech reading to people with impaired hearing through a combination of straightforward, easy-to-follow lessons, informative dialogue and instructive skits. It is available from the New York League for the Hard of Hearing, http://www.lhh.org/ct/speechreading.htm or contact the League at 71 West 23rd Street, New York, New York, 10010-4162, 917-305-7700 (voice) 917 305 7999 (TTY) 917 305-7888 Fax.

Lipreading or more accurately, speechreading, helps us fill in the blanks when we misunderstand. But it can not be the only way to understand the spoken message.

© Copyright 2001 Margie Littell Ulrich. All rights reserved.