Lip reading
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Lip reading, also known as speech reading, is a technique of understanding spoken language without hearing its sounds. Practitioners learn the phonemes associated with the shape and attitude of the mouth and infer words from what they view. It is often used by the deaf and hard of hearing, combining watching the movements of the lips and face with information provided by the situation (context), language, and any residual hearing. Exaggerated mouthing of words is not helpful and may destroy useful clues. However, it is possible to learn to emphasize these clues - this is called lip speaking.
Although lip reading is commonly taught, it does not lead to perfect understanding. For instance the phrase "Isle of view" would be lip read as "I love you" in some English dialects. More significant, though, are not homophones, but phonemes that look alike. Examples of phonemes whose only distinguishing features are auditory include Template:IPA; Template:IPA; Template:IPA; Template:IPA and so on. Critics and proponents alike claim that 30%-50% understanding of language by lip reading is about the maximum achievable. This would presumably vary from language to language. Other issues with lip reading include the necessity of a clear view of the speaker's lips; the difficulty of lip reading when multiple people are talking in quick succession (as the lip reader must look to see who is talking); possible obstructions of the lips, including hands in front of the lips, some styles of facial hair or makeup/lip stick, etc. In addition, lip reading takes a lot of focus, and can be extremely tiring.
Quote from the Listening Eye, Dorothy Clegg,1953, "When you are deaf you live inside a well-corked glass bottle. You see the entrancing outside world, but it does not reach you. After learning to lip read, you are still inside the bottle, but the cork has come out and the outside world slowly but surely comes in to you." This view is relatively controversial within the deaf world - see manualism and oralism for an incomplete history of this debate.
Lip reading may be combined with Cued Speech; one of the arguments in favor of the use of cued speech is that it helps develop lip reading skills that may be useful even when cues are absent, i.e., when communicating with non-deaf, non-hard of hearing people.
External links
- CSAIL: Articulatory Feature Based Visual Speech Recognition - To develop a visual speech recognition system that models visual speech in terms of the underlying articulatory processes.
