Hearing-impaired speechreaders focus on visual characteristics of speech sounds, termed visemes. Determination of viseme groupings requires consideration of the sound's visible characteristics and articulatory differences of speakers. Coarticulation effects that modify viseme groups include vowel-context effects on consonant viseme groupings,…

Tracking as a technique for training and evaluating speechreaders' reception of connected discourse is redefined, and some of its modifications are presented. Also noted are issues in the use of tracking, such as verbatim response, talker learning, and material selection, and recommendations for preparing speechreaders for the tracking task. (JDD)

This paper examines the special considerations involved in selecting a speech perception test battery for young deaf children. The auditory-only tests consisted of closed-set word identification tasks and minimal-pairs syllable tasks. Additional tests included identification of words in sentences, open-set word recognition, and evaluation of…

Experiments in the Netherlands assessing speechreading in a total of 80 deaf children (ages 8-18) under different conditions found that the use of 3 different video images (entire face, two-thirds profile, and lips only) and 4 different speech rates did not result in significantly different scores. (Author/JDD)

This investigation documented how hearing-impaired adults (n=8) use communication repair strategies and attempted to change these strategies by communication therapy. Subjects practiced using alternative repair strategies when they did not correctly speechread a videotaped sentence. After therapy, subjects utilized the "repeat" strategy less and…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that visual information related to segmental versus prosodic aspects of speech is distributed differently on the face of the talker. Results indicate that information in the upper part of the talker's face is more critical for intonation pattern decisions than for decisions about word segments…

Primates, including humans, communicate using facial expressions, vocalizations and often a combination of the two modalities. For humans, such bimodal integration is best exemplified by speech-reading--humans readily use facial cues to enhance speech comprehension, particularly in noisy environments. Studies of the eye movement patterns of human…

Lip reading is the ability to partially understand speech by looking at the speaker's lips. It improves the intelligibility of speech in noise when audio-visual perception is compared with audio-only perception. A recent set of experiments showed that seeing the speaker's lips also enhances "sensitivity" to acoustic information,…

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS), either before age two (early) or later at school (late), were presented with pseudowords with and without CS. The main goal was to establish the way in which lipreading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts, similar to audiovisual integration in speech perception, when participants are presented with…

Factors influencing the use of nonacoustic aids (such as visual displays and tactile devices) with the hearing impaired are reviewed. The benefits of tactile devices in improving speech reading/lipreading and speech are pointed out. Tactile aids which provide information on rhythm, rate, intensity, and duration of speech increase lipreading and…