Hearing-impaired speechreaders use linguistic context to compensate for the poor visibility of some speech movements. Constraints on spoken language enhance speechreading performance and help compensate for the paucity of sensory data. The largest effects come from linguistic constraints imposed by sentence context--syntactic, semantic, and…

Martin Luther King's speech is examined as a sermon in the Black Baptist tradition. The speech, which is a dialog between speaker and audience, has, in addition to the "message" contained in the code, a broader ethnographic meaning. The speech event itself is metaphorical in nature, signaling political protest. (Author/BJV)