Vowel Visemes Lipread by Primary School Students with Hearing Impairment

Author: Fang-liu Su(Special Education Center; National Taiwan Normal University)

Vol.&No.：Vol. 43, No. 1
Date：April 1998
Pages：1-16
DOI：10.3966/2073753X1998044301001

Abstract：

The purposes of this study were to explore the contents of vowel visemes lipread by elementary students with hearing impairment, and to examine whether talker differences existed by way of different visemes revealed. Subjects were thirty elementary students from four resource programs for the hearing-impaired in Taipei City. They were aE 6th graders. Nineteen of them were boys and eleven were girls. They were pre-lingual deaf with severe to profound hearing loss. Twenty-two of them had normal eyesight, while the other eight wore glasses. They lipread a set of 156 CV syllables and then wrote down what they thought they had seen. The syllables were formed by one consonant (either /n/ or /h/) plus one of the 14 Manderine vowels (with the exclusion of two vowels for articulatory reasons). These syllables were divided into three parts, and each part was spoken by one speaker. They were videotaped for the purpose of this study. Data were analyzed with Agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis and ANOVA. The results were as follows: 1. Only one cluster was formed, with nine vowels involved. There were five vowels which failed to form a viseme. 2. Percentage of correct response for that cluster was high: 84.03%, while that for each consonant varied from 77.50% to 15.00%, with the average 47.54%. It also showed that most of the errors were located within the very cluster, which indicated that vowels within the cluster were highly confused. 3. There seemed to be no significant differences in viseme formed across three talkers; minute discrepancies, however, did emerge in two areas: (1) ten vowels were clustered by lipreading B speaker; and (2) scores of eight vowels showed significant differences.

Keywords：hearing impairment, lipreading, viseme, vowel

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