Speechreading Suggestions

Editor: Speechreading! We all do it (even folks with perfect hearing), but it seems that some are much better at it than others. Whatever your speechreading skill level, you can get better by following some guidelines, and the person speaking to you can help by following guidelines for them. Here's Steve Silverman with the whole story! He is a late deaf teacher of the deaf, and current president of ALDA-LA.

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The camera pans to a young woman sitting alone in a convertible as her traveling companions leave her at the pump while they run into the mini-mart. A man, one she has presumably never seen before, goes into a phone booth, picks up the receiver, and engages in a prolonged conversation. While his profile or less is all she can see, the young woman watches intently, and becomes increasingly agitated, only to fairly gush in sign language when her companions return. She had speechread that stranger, and seen him discussing the most heinous plans, which she delineates in animated, accurate detail, having understood every nuance.

TV reality. Real life: speechreading a stranger fifty feet away and not even facing you? No way. HOH-LD-News recently reported that a Scottish woman lipreader, "can lip read what is being said even when her subject is not facing her, is speaking in an accent and has a beard....

"Her skill has caught two IRA bomb plotters and snared a gang behind a £2.9million heist at Heathrow. She has watched people talking about how to chop up corpses before."

That statement immediately follows the assertion, "The media often portrays people with hearing loss who can understand a complete conversation from across the room. But hearing loss experts assure us that those depictions are very unrealistic."

It IS unrealistic. No qualifiers. Can that woman do it? An everyday maxim says, "Don't let those who say it cannot be done get in the way of those doing it." I have seen entirely too many validations of that expression to discount it entirely. At it's very best, however, those kinds of speechreading skills have to be no more than extraordinarily rare, noteworthy for their vast distance from mainstream lipreading abilities. The simple facts are that lipreading strangers, mustachioed men, people with accents, fast talkers, three-year olds, and mumblers ranks perilously near impossible.

In terms of physical realities, speechreading at all should be impossible. The human eye simply cannot process visual information at the speed of normal speech. Nevertheless, I do it, and have seen others do it as well or better than I.

Speechreading English is not easy to do. Estimates of the amount of English visible to the speechreader tend to hover around thirty percent. The speechreader's task is to work with that visible amount to ascertain meaning. The suggestions below for speechreader and speaker are mostly from personal experience and unattributed materials acquired over nearly twenty years of hearing loss.

Much of the available information on speechreading focuses only on language reception. This information overlooks both the speechreader as a party to communication and his or her expressive obligations in the conversation. Those omissions mean communicative flow is not discussed as fully or helpfully as it could be, so I will include those aspects as well as language reception.

I will use the words "speechreading" and "lipreading" interchangeably. Forgive me, please, if some of these observations are insultingly obvious.