Speech reading barriers

[Bottesini]

No, there is a certain look..I think others who grew up orally know what I am talking about. With that big "Joker"-like grin and the constant nodding of the head but the conversation is one-way with me doing the talking rather than two-way with a healthy dialogue. It is hard to explain via Internet but I know when someone really doesnt want to deal with me simply because of my different needs of communication as a deaf person.

I do know what you mean.

 

[deafbajagal]

Professional answer: People who smile while they talk have their lips stretched, which affects the mouth formation - and makes it very difficult to speech read. It is much worse when I'm blinded by bleached teeth.

Real reason: I'm miserable, and I want everybody else to be miserable, too! Why should they be happy?!

 

[VamPyroX]

Last night at the public library, I was on volunteer duty, returning books to the shelves. A young lady approached already speaking in a rapid and breathless manner:

". . . uh . . . you know . . . like . . . lost my book . . . your book . . . the library’s book . . . that was . . . you know . . . I mean . . . like due last . . . um . . . week . . . you know. . . ."

Held up my hand to stop her. “I’m deaf,” I said, also making the sign for deaf. “But I can speech read if you can go a bit slower.” By that time I had waded through her lip movements, shrugs, and facial contortions to understand that she was trying to say: “I can’t find my overdue library book. What do I do now?”

She then spoke v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. “Is . . . uh . . . some . . . uh . . . one . . . some . . . body . . . you know . . . a person . . . that . . . ur . . . can . . . like, you know . . . talk . . . and . . . um . . . here?”

The last phrase could have been “can talk and hear” or “can talk here.” Who knows? But it was delivered with a deep frown, eyes darting around like she was looking for an escape route.

Anyway, I said, “Sure. I’ll take you to the checkout desk to speak to the librarian.”

She never smiled, never looked grateful, never offered thanks, but when we got to the desk, she said to the librarian (not to me, the retard), “He . . . um . . . like . . . you know . . . talks . . . um . . . I mean . . . real . . . um . . . good.”

Lots better than you, I thought, but didn’t say out loud. If you speech read, what are some of the barriers you encounter?

I know what you mean.

I've gone through the same thing several times before.

Suppose they normal speed limit is 40 MPH. If someone talks at 60 MPH and I ask them to slow down, they will slow down to 20 MPH. Jeez... I'm not THAT dumb! :roll:

It can be frustrating. Some people just don't have the patience for it.

 

[Matilda]

Professional answer: People who smile while they talk have their lips stretched, which affects the mouth formation - and makes it very difficult to speech read. It is much worse when I'm blinded by bleached teeth.

Real reason: I'm miserable, and I want everybody else to be miserable, too! Why should they be happy?!

 

[Jolie77]

I definitely can relate to that.

It annoys me at the most when I ask a person to it slow down and they're like "Ookkkkaaaay, Caaaaaannnnn yooooooouu unnnnddeeerrrstttaaand meeee nowwwww?"

*groans*

 

[Pepsi]

No, there is a certain look..I think others who grew up orally know what I am talking about. With that big "Joker"-like grin and the constant nodding of the head but the conversation is one-way with me doing the talking rather than two-way with a healthy dialogue. It is hard to explain via Internet but I know when someone really doesnt want to deal with me simply because of my different needs of communication as a deaf person.

I know exactly what you are saying Shel,sometimes I feel like I want to punch them in the face.

 

[Matilda]

I know exactly what you are saying Shel,sometimes I feel like I want to punch them in the face.

I did that once! ... in my dream (or nightmare). Gave a mighty good punch on a person's nose in the dream, but ended up punching the hard wooden bed-head which woke me up, cradling my hand in agony. OUCH!! ... ... naturally, had sore knuckles for days!

 

[August]

Professional answer: People who smile while they talk have their lips stretched, which affects the mouth formation - and makes it very difficult to speech read. It is much worse when I'm blinded by bleached teeth.

Real reason: I'm miserable, and I want everybody else to be miserable, too! Why should they be happy?!

I KNEW IT!!

 

[Pepsi]

I did that once! ... in my dream (or nightmare). Gave a mighty good punch on a person's nose in the dream, but ended up punching the hard wooden bed-head which woke me up, cradling my hand in agony. OUCH!! ... ... naturally, had sore knuckles for days!

I never want to get on your bad side.

 

[Matilda]

I never want to get on your bad side.

(sorry off-topic)

 

[Chase]

how can you know if they're smiling because they think you're dumb? maybe they're just happy?

It really makes no difference why the constant smilers are smiling -- it's a barrier to speech reading due to the drawn configuration of lips, teeth, chin, etc. The smilers may be practiced at pronouncing precisely, much the way ventrilaquists do, but that's no benefit to deafies.

 

[Matilda]

It really makes no difference why the constant smilers are smiling -- it's a barrier to speech reading due to the drawn configuration of lips, teeth, chin, etc. The smilers may be practiced at pronouncing precisely, much the way ventrilaquists do, but that's no benefit to deafies.

Well said! .... As I mentioned in another thread, I have 4 uncles exactly like ventriloquists! So annoying!

 

[Miss-Delectable]

At my work, I noticed that I couldn't lipread a customer if they had some teeth missing. I was like in my mind 'huh, what did you say?'. Admittedly, it's distracting, too, when I couldn't focus on their lips because of all those missing teeth!

I realised having a full of teeth tends to make words form better with lips than without. JMO

 

[Chase]

At my work, I noticed that I couldn't lipread a customer if they had some teeth missing. I was like in my mind 'huh, what did you say?'.

I never analyzed it until you mentioned the distraction factor, Miss D, but I know I have to take a step or two back when there's some anomaly like you mentioned -- seriously missing teeth, extensive braces, gaudy jewelry pierced through the lips or tongue.

If I don't step back and speech read more than lip read (you silent observers know what I mean) I get too focused on the object and lose track of clues.

That's a definite barrier.

 

[deafskeptic]

I know exactly what you are saying Shel,sometimes I feel like I want to punch them in the face.

Perhaps we should buy a poster of the Joker with his big grin and throw darts at it.

On more serious note, I think I know what shel and deafbajagal are on about. Too bad we can't throw darts at them.

 

[deafskeptic]

At my work, I noticed that I couldn't lipread a customer if they had some teeth missing. I was like in my mind 'huh, what did you say?'. Admittedly, it's distracting, too, when I couldn't focus on their lips because of all those missing teeth!

I realised having a full of teeth tends to make words form better with lips than without. JMO

Ha ha. There are few things lip readers dread more than people with missing teeth. I hear many hearing have a hard time understanding those people too.

 

[jenni-m]

I never analyzed it until you mentioned the distraction factor, Miss D, but I know I have to take a step or two back when there's some anomaly like you mentioned -- seriously missing teeth, extensive braces, gaudy jewelry pierced through the lips or tongue.

If I don't step back and speech read more than lip read (you silent observers know what I mean) I get too focused on the object and lose track of clues.

That's a definite barrier.

That's interesting!
I think that is a bit similar to me in ways, and probably why I don't lip/speech read (aside from having to be -uncomfortably- close)...

I only have a small 'window' of vision, and very near sighted, so having to be close makes that 'window' even 'smaller'. So I can miss a lot of things and not even realize it, even with visual text I have to scan over it and build a context, a lot of it going by memory... how much I use memory depends on how many times I am willing to scan over it and make sure I have it 'right'.

Interesting things can happen here, (you will know especially if you know about 'garden paths' and such in English, among other context 'tricks')

A fun example of this is "The car driven past the barn crashed."
We see "the barn crashed" but, the barn did not crash, the car crashed. This can be confusing. That particular phrase is small enough for me to catch the difference, but if it were longer... I might see something similar to the "barn crashing" effect, and say "what? what is this?!"

 

[Chase]

Those are really good examples of barriers to speech reading from the way different speakers express themselves.

The case of "The car driven past the barn crashed" shows a chance for confusion even in a correct sentence, but it takes time to see the kernal sentence is "The car crashed."

Worse are mangled sentences we see, like "He found a dollar walking home" and "Taking off from the Albany airport, the sun rose reddly in the east." I must have puzzled over that last one for five whole minutes. It just didn't make sense! Ha ha ha.

 

[jenni-m]

Those are really good examples of barriers to speech reading from the way different speakers express themselves.

The case of "The car driven past the barn crashed" shows a chance for confusion even in a correct sentence, but it takes time to see the kernal sentence is "The car crashed."

Worse are mangled sentences we see, like "He found a dollar walking home" and "Taking off from the Albany airport, the sun rose reddly in the east." I must have puzzled over that last one for five whole minutes. It just didn't make sense! Ha ha ha.

What is even worse is something like:
""Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

From wikipedia ( Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia )

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to construct complicated constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, currently an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.[1] It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992.[2] It was also featured in Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct. Sentences of this type, although not in such a refined form, have been known for a long time. A classic example is the proverb "Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you".

Sentence construction

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". In order of their first use, these are

* c. The city of Buffalo, New York (or any other place named "Buffalo"), which is used as an adjective in the sentence and is followed by the animal;
* a. The animal buffalo, in the plural (equivalent to "buffaloes"), in order to avoid articles (a noun);
* v. The verb "buffalo" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate.

Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives

Buffaloc buffaloa Buffaloc buffaloa buffalov buffalov Buffaloc buffaloa.

Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the pecking order in the social hierarchy of buffaloes living in Buffalo:

[Those] (Buffalo buffalo) [whom] (Buffalo buffalo buffalo) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).
[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo.
Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community. [...]

 

[VamPyroX]

I definitely can relate to that.

It annoys me at the most when I ask a person to it slow down and they're like "Ookkkkaaaay, Caaaaaannnnn yooooooouu unnnnddeeerrrstttaaand meeee nowwwww?"

*groans*

Did you reply the same way? "Yeeeeessss.... IIIIIII... caaaaaaannnnnn."