Speechreading

A Way To Improve Understanding

Harriet Kaplan

• Publisher: Gallaudet University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780930323325
• eBook ISBN: 9781563681806
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Speechreading: A Way to Improve Understanding discusses the nature and process of speechreading, its benefits, and its limitations. This useful book clarifies commonly-held misconceptions about speechreading. The beginning chapters address difficult communication situations and problems related to the speaker, the speechreader, and the environment. It then offers strategies to manage them.

       Speechreading provides practical exercises illustrating the use ofthese communication strategies in actual situations. It is an excellent book for late-deafened adults, families and friends, parents of children with hearing loss, and professionals and students.

1. Principles of Speechreading

In this chapter the nature of speechreading, how it can help overall communication, and how it can be used with hearing will be discussed. Factors that make a person a good speechreader will also be discussed.

What Is Speechreading?

Many people are more familiar with an older term lipreading, which they interpret as the ability to recognize the different sounds of speech by observing movements of the lips, tongue, and jaw. The implication of this definition is that a skilled lipreader can interpret all speech movements and thereby substitute vision for hearing. Also implied is that this skill can be learned. This concept was probably fostered by early lipreading methods which stressed the recognition of speech movements.

Actually, skilled speechreaders depend on much more than the information available from the movements of the lips, tongue, and jaw. They interpret facial expressions, gestures, and body language and use clues available from the situation and what they know about the language. When the term speechreading was introduced, it was intended to include not only the more narrow concept of lipreading but also the other factors listed above. Therefore, a working definition of speech-reading might be “the ability to understand a speaker's thoughts by watching the movements of the face and body and by using information provided by the situation and the language.” Today, most people use the terms lipreading and speechreading interchangeably to mean use of all visual and situational information available.

Components of Speechreading

The vast majority of speechreading teachers do not emphasize recognition of individual sounds. This skill is certainly important to speechreading, but the person who tries to recognize every sound as it is spoken will miss much of the information conveyed by the message. Therefore, sound recognition is not the component of speechreading that receives the most attention in training.

Gestures and Body Language

Gestures are mainly movements of the hands and arms, but they may also involve the head or other body parts. They are used in all cultures and may substitute for speech or supplement what the speaker says. Most gestures are used to supplement speech. An example is arm and hand movement to emphasize a point. Another example is glancing toward the people or objects being discussed. Following are some ways gestures can substitute for speech:

1. A nod of the head means “yes” or “I agree.”

2. A beckoning movement of the hands or fingers can mean “come here.”

On the hands of a skilled mime, gestures can almost be a complete language.

There have been a few studies on the contribution of natural gestures to speechreading. Berger, Martin, and Sataloff (1970) and Popelka and Berger (1971) demonstrated that understanding of speech improves significantly when appropriate gestures are used but deteriorates when the gestures are not appropriate.

Body language or body position is a form of gesture. This refers to how people sit, stand, or move their bodies. A person's mood can often be identified by body position or movement. A tired, unhappy, or bored person's shoulders may slump; a lowered head may indicate sadness or a dejected feeling. In contrast, a happy or enthusiastic person will probably stand upright with head held high.

Facial Expressions

Facial expressions, which are a common part of normal communication, can also supplement speechreading. A smiling face indicates happiness; raised eyebrows indicate questioning; a puzzled look suggests lack of understanding. The more expressive a speaker, the easier he or she is to understand. The more a speechreader can interpret facial expressions, the better he or she can understand.

Situational Clues

Situational clues include the place of the conversation and the roles of the people talking. The location can help you predict the kind of language used. For example, different things are said in a bank, a restaurant, the classroom, and a doctor's office. Furthermore, the speaker's role in a given situation affects what is said. In a restaurant, a waiter will not use the same language as your dinner companion. Situational clues help the speechreader, predict the language used. You can predict what the waiter might say when he approaches your table because of his role in the situation. Since the possibilities are limited, it should not be difficult to resolve ambiguities seen on the lips.

Linguistic Factors

Language has a great deal of redundancy. This means there are many clues to understanding based on the structure of the language and many clues to correct interpretation of a spoken message occurring at the same time. Look at the sentence, I am the teacher in this class. You might understand the key word teacher by (a) the way it looks on the lips, (6) the way it sounds, or (c) what you could figure out from context (the sentence itself). All of that is redundancy. The more redundant a language, the less likely you are to make mistakes and the better you can function if some clues are missing such as a clearly heard message.

Language redundancy is provided by the rules of the language learned as children. The better you know your language, the easier it is to speechread. Some rules used by most speechreaders/listeners follow.

1. There are a limited number of sounds in English, thirty-eight to be exact. All spoken messages must consist of only those sounds.

2. Sounds can be combined only in certain ways. In our language, /pr/ as in the word pretty is possible, but combinations such as /sr/ or /gt/ are not possible.

3. Parts of words (prefixes and suffixes) can be connected to main words only in certain ways. It is correct to say coming or unhappy, but not ingcome or happyun.

4. Words can be combined only in certain ways. In most English sentences, the subject comes first, then the verb, and then the object. For example, “He is going to the store” is correct, but “Going to the store he” is not acceptable.

5. The way in which words are spoken affects meaning. When people speak, they emphasize certain words to give meaning to what they say. They also vary intonation—the rise and fall of the voice in speaking. Where pauses occur in a sentence can also make a difference in meaning. Look at some examples.

Example A. You're staying home.
By emphasizing the last word and dropping the voice at the end of the sentence, the speaker tells the listener that she or he had better stay home. The message is even stronger if there is an angry look on the face and the hands are placed on the hips.

Example B. You're staying home.
Now the stress is on the word you're, meaning that you and not another person will stay home.

Example C. You're staying home?
This time the emphasis is on the last word but there is an upward tone of voice. There may also be a questioning look on the face. The meaning is quite different. Now we're asking a question.

Example D. I want the milkman.
With no pause between milk and man, the speaker is simply asking for the milkman. However, the meaning changes if a pause is inserted. The sentence—I want the milk, man—has a completely different meaning.

You might argue that these things are not really speechreading but are related to hearing and the use of information provided by gestures and facial expressions. Yet, this linguistic information may be considered part of the broader definition of speechreading: “The ability to understand a speaker's thoughts by watching the movements of the face and body and by using information provided by the situation and the language.”

How do you use the redundancies of language to aid speechreading? Because what can be seen on the lips is limited, and because of the many ambiguities in the spoken message, you use the redundancies of language—situational clues, gestures, and facial expressions—to make good guesses. Knowledge of what the language structure permits allows you to fill in missing words or change words that do not make sense. For example,

Speaker says: Where have you been?

You speechread: Where are you been?

You think: Are does not make sense. It must be have.

While the speaker is talking, you may mentally replace words that seemed correct earlier in the conversation but now don't make sense because you have more information. For example,

You speechread: I saw her mother downtown yesterday.

You speechread later in the conversation: Her mother and father are living in Florida now.

You think: Mother couldn't have been right in the earlier sentence. Maybe the speaker said brother.

So, speechreading is a combination of what the eyes can see and the mind can correctly fill in. The work of the eyes is called the analytic component and work of the mind is called the synthetic component Development of the analytic component is called eye training while development of the synthetic component is called mind training. Mind training is by far the most important part of speechreading. A good speechreader can take whatever is seen on the speaker's face, combine it with gestures, body language, facial expression, linguistic rules, situational clues, and whatever can be heard and make some sense of it.

Relationship to Hearing

The greater the hearing loss, the more a person tends to rely on vision for understanding of speech. Everyone, however, needs to speechread part of the time. In a noisy environment or when listening to poor speech, the normal hearing person uses speechreading, although she or he may not be aware of doing so.

People with mild or moderate hearing losses, who can understand speech with hearing aids, usually depend more on hearing than vision. Still, there are many situations in which their hearing aids do not clearly reproduce speech. Hearing aids are of limited value in a group situation, in noise, or in a room with poor acoustics. Any situation requiring differentiation of speech from any kind of competing signal presents problems to the hearing aid wearer. In addition, many hearing aids do not clearly reproduce sounds like /s/, /f/, /th/, /p/, and /t/. Some people have hearing losses that distort these sounds so badly no hearing aid can remedy the situation. Interestingly, however, these sounds are relatively easy to speechread.

Many hearing-impaired people with mild or moderate losses have difficulty understanding speech no matter how loud it is. Sometimes, the best hearing aid can clarify only vowels but not high frequency consonants. When any of these problems exist, the individual communicates best with a combination of speechreading and aided hearing.

The person with a severe to profound loss may not be able to get enough help from a hearing aid to understand speech well, especially if there is a severe discrimination problem. This individual must depend primarily on sign language, speechreading, or both. Still, anything heard through a hearing aid can help communication even if hearing is not the primary communication channel.

The ability to hear some sound helps speechreading for most people. Even with a profound loss these people, with properly fitted hearing aids, can hear

1. Pauses in a sentence

The individual becomes aware of when someone is talking and where the speaker pauses in a sentence. As mentioned earlier, pauses are very important to meaning. Here is another example.

a. Goodbye God, we're going home.

b. Good, by God, we're going home.

2. The difference between long and short words

3. The stressed word in a sentence

The stressed word is usually the most important word. In addition, changing the stress often changes the meaning. For example, content means what something is about; content means satisfied. Notice the only difference between the two words is the stress.

4. The difference between asking a question or making a statement

5. Some vowel sounds

All of these features of speech are very difficult if not impossible to speechread. When the audible aspects of speech are put together with what can be seen and understood from context, the redundancy of communication is increased.

A fair amount of research has been done on the effects of hearing on speechreading. Most studies indicate that speech understanding improves when speechreading is combined with listening. Some people are concerned that use of speechreading during early years places too much emphasis on vision to the neglect of hearing. These people favor the use of residual hearing alone during early training of young children. They recognize, however, the value of speechreading once the child has learned to use hearing. With adults and older children, research evidence strongly favors using hearing together with speechreading and/or sign language. For further discussion of these issues, see Berger (1978), O'Neill and Oyer (1981), and Sanders (1982).

What Makes a Good Speechreader?

Although most people can learn to improve speechreading skills, some people seem to have a natural aptitude for it. For a long time, researchers and teachers have tried to understand how good speechreaders differ from poor speech-readers. Although there is still some speculation, most authorities agree that the most important factor in successful speechreading is synthetic ability. Synthetic ability means that the person is able to take the limited information seen on the face, fill in the gaps using other information present in the situation, and correctly identify a spoken message. The speechreader sees part of a message, puts it together, and makes sense of it.

In contrast to the synthetic type of mind is the analytic mode of functioning. The analytic person attempts to identify each sound movement before attaching meaning to the sentence, rather than intuitively grasping an idea as a whole. As Jeffers and Barley (1971) said, “The willingness (or ability) to guess and to close is ... what separates the 'synthetic' from the 'analytic' speechreader. “An analytic approach to speechreading does not work because the flow of speech moves too quickly.

Jeffers and Barley (1971) proposed a theoretical model consisting of three factors. The first is visual perceptual proficiency which they defined as the ability to see fine detail and identify speech movements accurately and rapidly. The second is synthetic ability, and the third is flexibility. They defined flexibility as the ability to make quick changes in one's perception of the message if the original decision proves inaccurate. For example, an isolated sentence may look very much like another sentence having a different meaning.

Example A. I have to go.

Example B. I have a cold.

As conversation continues, the speechreader may realize that the first interpretation of what was seen doesn't make sense. If the speechreader is flexible in thinking, he or she can quickly substitute the second possibility which looks the same but makes better sense.

Although the skills of synthetic thinking and flexibility are intellectual or mental skills, they are not related to general intelligence. Analytic thinkers are often highly intelligent people. None of the research studies designed to evaluate the relationship between speechreading and general intelligence have found any relationship between the two.

A number of other factors have been looked at as predictors of speechreading skill. They include

Amount of training. Most authorities feel that the more training a person receives, the better a speechreader he or she becomes. Jeffers and Barley (1971) stated that maximum improvement occurs after one to three years of training, depending on the individual, but that the speech-reader must continue to practice if the skill is to be maintained.

Even though most people improve with training, the rate of improvement and the level of skill achieved vary considerably. People start at different levels of skill for reasons we don't fully understand, and they don't necessarily make the same amount of improvement as others in the same training program. There are individual differences. Therefore, a person in a speechreading training program should evaluate only his or her own improvement without com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Principles of Speechreading
• 2. Limitations of Speechreading
• 3. Visibility and Homopheneity
• 4. Communication Strategies
• 5. Practical Exercises in Communication Strategies
• 6. Speechreading Tests and Methods
• 7. Speechreading Exercises
• References
• Index