Hearing aids, as you know, greatly increase your ability to understand conversations. Their adaptive features seamlessly adjust to increase speech intelligibility. But learning to read visual cues and understanding basic Speech Reading can help interpretation and enable one to ‘fill in’ any blanks. Everyone uses speech reading, though mostly subconsciously. By practicing and identifying patterns from speech reading, one can learn to interpret speech cues more easily.
What is Speech Reading?
Similar in nature to lip-reading, speech reading uses visual information to help comprehension. Speech reading differs because focus isn’t solely on the shape and movement of the lips, but includes clues or details from other sources, i.e. gestures and facial expressions.
Whilst it can be difficult to accurately interpret through lip-reading alone, knowing some basic lip and speech reading skills can significantly improve what you are able to hear, and enable the conversation to flow more smoothly.
Essentially, learning to use these visual cues is a way of narrowing down the possible sounds or phonemes that someone is using, in order to make guess work more successful.
In the English language, about 30% of speech can be visualised. These ‘visible sounds’ tend to be those that use distinct mouth shapes. Pursed lips or a tongue pressed against the teeth can help identify the consonant being used.
So how can you develop your Speech Reading skills?
You can try performing speech exercises in the mirror at home, by simply speaking or making speech sounds and analysing the shape of the mouth.
• Words with /p/, /b/, /m/, and /w/ are made by pursing the lips together. Good practice words to visualize these are: mum, map, we, pill, boat, etc.
• Words with /v/ and /f/ are made by pressing the upper teeth to the lower lip. Practice words like: fat, vein, very, have, sofa, food, etc.
• The sounds /s/ and /sh/ make a rounded shape, with the speaker’s teeth close together. The /r/ sound also makes a rounded shape, but the teeth are slightly separated. Practice with shirt, round, rat, etc.
• Vowels tend to leave the speaker’s mouth open. Try saying bat, meet, suit, my, etc.
It can be very difficult to pick out specific sounds in speech, especially if they have the same mouth position/shape. But, narrowing the options to just a few possible sounds makes it much easier to guess what is being said.
Lip reading can be particularly helpful for those with hearing loss as many of these visible sounds fall in the ranges where most people tend to lose hearing first.
Just as sounds that tend to be easier to see are usually more difficult to hear, sounds that are easier to hear are generally more difficult to see.
After you’ve had plenty of practice, why don’t you try watching some dialogue on TV on mute and see if you can guess what is being said. Use subtitles to verify if your guesses are correct.
Speech reading is more than analysing lips, so it is important to be aware of other cues that may be available. Be aware of body language, gestures, facial expressions and context of conversations.
So what can you do to improve your conversations?
• Try to find out the topic of conversation as soon as possible. This will help you fill in the gaps, if you run into lip reading difficulties.
• Focus on the big picture instead of each sound/word. Understanding a sentence or comment as a whole is much more important than pinpointing a single word.
• Make sure you are able to see the other individual’s face. Being aware of facial expressions and gestures can provide clues about their speech and mood. Some gestures can be entire comments in and of themselves. Simply being aware that someone has nodded their head, shrugged, raised their eyebrows, or winked can provide a lot of information about the conversation.
• Use context to fill in the blanks. Considering your own situation can help to distinguish between words that look similar by lip reading only. For example a waiter is more likely to say “Would you like a CUP of water?” than “Would you like a TUB of water?”
• Keep up to date with current issues and the interests of friends and family. This will help you to know which topics or even keywords or buzzwords they are likely to use regularly.
Some of these techniques come naturally to all of us, but by paying even a little more attention to the context and visual cues of a conversation you can gain greater understanding and communicate more effectively.
