subject: Will I Benefit From Learning How To Speech Read? [print this page] Will I Benefit From Learning How To Speech Read?
Despite the fact that speech reading is not always accurate it is indispensable for many people who can't hear. It is not an aid that is generally used by itself, - there are three coping strategies for the hard of hearing, the first is hearing aids, the second is assistive listening devices and the third practical coping strategy is speech reading.The University of Manchester's research found that people who were hard of hearing and could benefit from hearing aids only understood 21% of speech if they relied on their residual hearing. Yet if this was combined with either a speech reading or hearing aid they understood 64% of what was being said. When they listened with residual hearing, hearing aids and speech reading they understood 90% of speech. That is quite a difference without it they understand a fifth of what is being said but understand nearly 2/3 of speech using a hearing aid and speech reading.Because of the way lips move when speaking English is not easy to understand what is being said, even native speech readers can only understand a third of it; and that success rate comes from sounds formed by the lips or at the front of the mouth. Unfortunately the majority of English sounds are formed either in the throat or at the back of the mouth and these sounds cannot be seen on the lips.Fortunately humans are adept at sorting out the meaning from context they can take into account the subject being discussed and body language, but it doesn't alter the fact that the results of speech reading are often conjecture. When we speak we make between 13 and 15 speech movements every second, but the eye can only notice eight or nine of the movements because the brain literally can't keep up. Our brains can only process a certain amount of information at any one time. If you are struggling with speech reading then ask the speaker to slow down, and give your eyes and brain a chance to catch up. Another difficulty is that homophonic sounds differ in their quality and meaning but they look the same and there is no way of distinguishing these sounds except in a contextual sense. This is one of the reasons why people who can't hear chime in with the others statements at irrelevant times. Examples are "I scream" and "ice cream".The level of success that you can achieve by speech reading is not entirely within your control some people move their lips whilst others don't. It is entirely possible that no matter how good you are at speech reading with some people you will not understand a word, which is another reason why it is rarely used as a stand-alone listening device. Statistically women find it easier and one of the reasons this is so maybe the fact that men lose their hearing earlier in life and to a much greater degree than women do. One of the downsides of speech reading is that it can't be done for very long because of the amount of concentration that it takes the hard of hearing must interpret every single gesture to extract meaning they can't blink or look away even for a second. Despite the fact that speech reading is not perfect it does assist many people to hear in conjunction with a hearing aid.
