5 Chapter 5: Visual Stimuli in Communication

Supplemental Learning Activities

• Speech Tracking – Activity that provides you with the materials to engage in a speech tracking activity
• Speechreading Activity:  Click here to go to lipreading.org where you can engage in training and games!
• Pick a favorite TV show of yours that involves actors engaged in dialogue. Try following what’s taking place for a few minutes under two situations: (a) Turn off the audio signal, making you rely exclusively on your vision to follow what is occurring; and (b) turn down the audio a lot so that the signal is really not very audible and use that limited auditory signal plus speechreading in a combined manner and attempt to follow the show. You may realize that the vision-only mode is very challenging, while the combined mode makes it more possible to stay with the action.
• Successful speechreading involves having to “fill in” missing information, just as it does with effective listening. The website above provides a learning activ- ity involving visual and auditory closure that demonstrates how this closure skill, or filling in, works and how important it can be in the visual and auditory perception of speech in communication.

Websites

• The development of speechreading in deaf and hearing children: Introducing a new Test of Child Speechreading (ToCS) (2009)
• Speechreading at Gallaudet
• Laurent Clerc National Deaf Education Center
• Computer-assisted Speech Perception Testing and Training at the Sentence Level (CASPERSENT)
• Speechreading – A way to Improve Understanding (downloadable material)