A Look into Lip Reading

What is Lip Reading?

Lip reading allows you to “listen” to a speaker by watching the speaker’s face to figure out their speech patterns, movements, gestures and expressions. Often called “a third ear,” lip reading goes beyond simply reading the lips of a speaker to decipher individual words. Some also refer to it as Speech Reading.

Learning to lip-read involves developing and practicing certain skills that can make the process much easier and more effective.

Skills Involved in Lip Reading

• Watching the movement of the mouth, teeth and tongue
• Reading facial expressions
• Paying attention to body language and gestures

Facts About Lip Reading

• Consonant shapes (p, f, sh, w) are:
  • Hard to hear
  • Easy to see
  • High-frequency sounds
• Vowel shapes are:Easy to hear
  • Hard to see
  • Low-frequency sounds

Lip Reading Involves:

• Hearing some of the sounds
• Recognizing and interpreting facial expressions, body language and gesture.
• ‘Putting two and two together’ and guessing words that you can neither lipread or hear by using the context and common sense to help you.

Did you know that sentences are easier to lipread than individual words and long words are easier to lipread than short words?

For more information on Lip reading, check out these resources:

Lipreading.org

HearingLink.org