Investigating Speechreading and Deafness

Investigating speechreading and deafness.

BACKGROUND The visual speech signal can provide sufficient information to support successful communication. However, individual differences in the ability to appreciate that information are large, and relatively little is known about their sources. PURPOSE Here a body of research is reviewed regarding the development of a theoretical framework in which to study speechreading and individual di...

Speech experience shapes the speechreading network and subsequent deafness facilitates it.

Speechreading is a visual communicative skill for perceiving speech. In this study, we tested the effects of speech experience and deafness on the speechreading neural network in normal hearing controls and in two groups of deaf patients who became deaf either before (prelingual deafness) or after (postlingual deafness) auditory language acquisition. Magnetic signals from the cerebral cortex we...

Visual phonemic ambiguity and speechreading.

PURPOSE To study the role of visual perception of phonemes in visual perception of sentences and words among normal-hearing individuals. METHOD Twenty-four normal-hearing adults identified consonants, words, and sentences, spoken by either a human or a synthetic talker. The synthetic talker was programmed with identical parameters within phoneme groups, hypothetically resulting in simplified ...

Prosody and speechreading

Speechreading Using Probabilistic Models Speechreading Using Probabilistic Models

A robust method for locating and tracking lips in gray level image sequences is described The method learns patterns of shape variability from a training set which constrains the model during image search to only deform in ways similar to the training examples Image search is guided by a learned gray level model which is used to describe the large appearance variability of lips Such variability...