First used in 1874, lipreading is “the interpreting of speech by watching the speaker’s lip and facial movements without hearing the voice.” Thank you, Webster’s!
Despite the relatively recent date (in human history) that the term was first identified and placed in the dictionary, I imagine that lipreading has been done since the age of the caveman:
“Oogheeh, face me when you grunt, will you? I can see your lips then, and the sound carries better that way.”
“Why, certainly, Grrragh.”
Which brings me to a common misconception, which is that people need to face a hearing challenged folks so that the sound will carry better. Au contraire! I bet you that many lipread without even knowing it and *that* is the reason for the required direction of the talking person.
For instance, I never knew I read lips until I was tested around the age of six. The tester would say something and ask me to repeat it. Then she’d cover her lips and ask me to repeat it, thus resulting in me asking her to remove her hand from her mouth so I could hear her better. I was lipreading and didn’t even know it!
I can’t tell you the exact moment I learned to read lips. As my hearing vanished, I unconsciously sought ways to continue to communicate, and that meant relying more on a sense that did work: my eyes. I would watch the lips and facial expressions of the people talking, listen to the sounds that my ears could pick up, and translate that into speech.
When I talk to someone, I’m not actually listening to the words; I’m focusing on the sounds. My ears are listening to whether a voice raises at the end of a sentence, indicating a question. My ears perk up at a pause, which indicates a break in thought. Facial expressions indicate a person said something funny and that I should laugh. When someone has an accent, the rhythm of a person’s speech is different. I use that rhythm to identify if the person is British, Spanish, African, Southern, etc.
I do use my ears when I lipread, however. The more I learn a person’s voice, the better I am able to identify words from the sounds and to identify speech rhythms without relying solely on lipreading. That gives my eyes a much-needed occasional break. Perhaps my eyes will dart to a picture, or the window, or anywhere but that person’s mouth. It’s tiring, watching people’s mouths all the time. But then again, I’m always going to be the person who will save you if you’ve got spinach in your teeth!
The point is, people adapt to their situations. Some adapt better than others, but people do adapt, and they may not even realize they were doing so! All the way back to the caveman, before hearing aids were invented, there must’ve been people with hearing deficiencies. Those people may not have been able to hear the direction the gazelle was running, but they could certainly see the grasses being flattened. They could feel the ground shaking when an elephant was charging behind them. And they probably used their lips to understand their fellow caveman.
With all respect to Webster’s, being able to lipread should be defined as using your eyes to eliminate a deficiency in the ears.
Another great post. Thank you.
When I was in my 20s, I did a stint as a teacher’s aide in a school for the hearing impaired in England and learned the importance of how you speak to someone who is lipreading, especially when that person is a young child, who is just learning. I also learned to rely on lipreading myself (in a small way) so as to interpret the speech of often profoundly deaf young children who were learning how to make sounds that they couldn’t hear. I am blessed with very good hearing, but I find I still watch people’s lips when they speak and especially when they are speaking the foreign languages I know to some degree because it seems to help my comprehension. I am far less secure when I speak in French or Italian on the telephone because I can’t see the other person. How weird is that!
The school I worked in was (as was the current fashion) totally oral tradition, and signing was officially verboten; however, the children of deaf signing parents did sign among themselves, and I learned some English Sign Language from them.
As an aside, knowing nothing about any theories of deaf education, I felt then and still do that it was very cruel to forbid signing. There were some children of hearing, nonsigning parents who were clearly never going to be able to communicate orally in a comprehensible way, and to deny them sign language was to isolate them not only from the hearing world, but also from the deaf world.
When my then husband and I came to Washington in the mid-seventies, we got into contact with cousins of his whom he’d never met, both deaf and both communicating primarily in sign language. I proudly trotted out some of my sign language, only to find that English and American Sign Language are different, and my husband’s cousins and their son-in-law (a professor at Gallaudet University, the Washington, DC university for the deaf and hearing-impaired) hadn’t a clue what I was trying to say.
You are a superb lipreader, and I sometimes wonder (so you’ll have to tell me) whether I over-emphasize lip movements when I talk to you. If so, it’s an automatic leftover from those way-back-when days with little children.
Something that will amuse you I think: If you and I have been talking in the office, and soon after our conversation, one of our colleagues comes in, I find myself turning to face him or her and trying not to mumble! By no means a bad thing.
Carol,
Awesome blog! Hey, your post brings to mind research done over the last 30 years by the late Bach-y-Rita. I’ve seen several articles and tv segments on him and he’s discovered that the brain has a very high “plasticity” which is the ability to re-wire itself to use the inputs it has to operate the body. One of the latest discoveries by his intellectual offspring is this device placed in the mouth (on the tongue) that “tricks” the brain into seeing. Basically, a camera is hooked up to this mouth-guard device that places small electrical stimuli on the tongue. With the eyes blind folded, or with someone visually impaired, the device actual imparts “visual” information onto the brain such that the subject can walk around the room, pick up objects and so forth. Its crazy how the other senses can be used and how the brain is able to process information. Find more info here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp_pr.html
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/story/97-mixed_feelings.html
Passante — you communicate superbly. Is it any wonder that I enjoy talking with you so much?! I’ve always thought it polite to look at the person you’re talking or listening to. Eye contact and facial expressions mean a lot in a conversation, lipreading or no.
Gabe — That. Is. Awesome! Muchas gracias for sharing!
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