The position of the jaw will drop for low vowels to facilitate the movement of the tongue.
- In lip reading the viewer has no way of knowing what the tongue is doing (because it is not visible). Hence, the only way that he/she can discriminate between words like "beat" and "bat" is to deduce the sound by observing the movement of the jaw.
- I might add that Speech reading is not just for the deaf or hard of hearing.
- We all use it when we are listening in a noisy environment and canÅt clearly hear the speech sounds.
- Then our gaze will subtly shift (often, without our even realizing it) from focusing on the speaker's eyes to observing his/her mouth.
- Ironically, in these situations, our "hearing" seems to gets worse if the lights are dimmed.
- Tense versus Lax: A very subtle distinctive feature is the degree of tenseness exhibited by the tongue when producing certain vowels.