Hearing Loss

Lesson 4: Skills For Surviving Hearing Loss

Speechreading (Formerly Called Lipreading)

Speechreading, formerly known as lipreading, is a very important survival tool when you can’t hear.

The main reason it’s called speechreading now is because there’s more to understanding a conversation than just looking at the mouth. Facial expressions, gestures, demeanor and visual clues all help us understand what’s being said.

Speechreading, no matter how good you are at it, is not accurate. Opinion varies as to how accurate it really is. I’ve read expert opinions that say accuracy is 33% at best and I’ve read others who say 70%. We're probably somewhere in between if we're skilled at it, but the number doesn't matter. No matter what the percentage, it’s better than none at all.

People pick up speechreading without realizing it. I had no idea I was doing it until a particular night when I was watching a baseball game with my family. When the player was called out, I asked my family, "Oh my! Did you hear what he said? I can’t believe they put that on t.v.!" "They didn’t," my husband answered. "You read his lips. Believe me, that wasn’t captioned!"

Indeed, I had read the player's lips. Once I realized I had done it, I paid strict attention to people’s mouths and started doing it more and more.

Tell people you’re hearing impaired and are reading their lips so they don’t wonder why you aren’t looking them in the eye.

In Coping with Hearing Loss, the author says, "The best way to start learning how to lipread is to watch yourself speak in a mirror." We’re also told there are five groups of sound that can be more easily read on the lips:

1. P, B, and M
2. F and V
3. Th
4. W and R – not exactly alike but hard to tell apart
5. Sh and Ch

In Missing Words (page 31), Eve Nickerson tells us she found B, P, M, OW, OH, YOU, and V easy to read.

Mark Ross, Ph.D., tells us on page 187 of Hearing Loss & Hearing Aids "Since only about 30% of the sounds in the English language are clearly visible on the lips, even in the best of circumstances there are lots of gaps that have to be filled in." He gives us a few examples of how we can predict words. Try the five sentences on page 187.

Also try practicing the above sounds in a mirror and see the way your lips look. Then get someone else to make the sounds and watch how their lips look. Practicing will help your accuracy, but again, don’t expect to read everything. Aim for enough to intuit the conversation.

There are some things to watch out for when trying to speechread. Certain things will impede your understanding such as:

• Mustaches
• Accents
• Eating or chewing gum while talking
• Putting hands in front of the mouth
• Looking away while talking to you

Obviously you can't ask someone to shave or change their accent, but if the person you're talking to is blocking their mouth from your view, do gently remind him or her that you need to see it to understand.

The Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center at Gallaudet University has a wonderful resource page that tells you where you can find tapes, books and classes on speechreading. They are at: http://clerccenter.gallaudet.edu/InfoToGo/011.html

I never took any formal speechreading classes, but now I’m considering it. Even after all these years of doing it naturally, I’d like to improve my skill at it. I think I would benefit from some structured training. I’m not too bad at it when my hearing aids are in, but when they’re out and I hear no sound at all, I can’t read very much.

Even if you've been reading naturally, consider some lessons. It may help your ability to communicate more than you can imagine.

Print this page

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8