Lip reading is much harder than the movies make it look. Read on to find out why.
Lip reading is much harder than the movies make it look. The youtube channel Bad Lip Reading pokes fun at this by matching funny lines to lip movements. Watch this clip bellow to get a better idea.
The reason they are able to do this, and the reason lip reading is so hard, is that there are few visual cues for English speech Sounds, and many sounds share the same visual cue. Consider the following:
Pressing the Lips Together
Sounds made by pressing the lips together, or bilabial sounds, include /b/, /p/ /m/.
Lip Rounding
Sounds accompanied by lip rounding include: /w/ and vowels in the boot, boy, cow, and boat. There is also a little with “sh” and /r/, though /r/ is mild and more puckered.
Lip Spreading
Sounds made by spreading the lips apart include the vowel in “eat.”
Teeth and Lip
Sounds made by contacting the teeth and lip are called labiodental and include /f/ and /v/.
Tongue Tip Behind Front Teeth
If a speaker opens their mouth wide enough, the lip reader can see when the tongue tip touches the bony outcrop behind the front teeth called the alveolar ridge. Sounds produced this way include /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/. /s/ and /z/ are also made in this location, but the mouth is usually too closed to see them. That closure is necessary to create the friction needed to create those sounds.
Open Mouth
Sounds produced towards the back of the mouth, /k/, /g/, and to some extent /r/, are accompanied by an open mouth.
How Bad Lip Reading Works
To create a Bad Lip Reading video, the youtuber merely has to watch for the few visual cues described above and match the sounds to them. As long as they choose sounds with the same visual cue, they can substitute almost anything they want. This makes it easy to put words in other people’s mouths.
Before dismissing the importance of visual cues in speech, however, consider the McGurk Effect.
The McGurk Effect
The McGurk Effect occurs when the visual cues don’t match the audio. When this happens, our brains integrate the information, and we perceive a sound somewhere in between. Watch this video, created by professor Arnt Maasø at the University of Oslo, twice. The first time, keep your eyes closed. Open your eyes for the second time.
The first time you probably heard /ba/ because that was the audio. The second time you likely heard something closer to /da/ because your brain integrated the audio for /ba/ with the visual for the /ga/, so you perceived something in between.
There may not be many visual cues for lip reading, but they are important. Next time you speak to someone who is Deaf or Hard of Hearing, be sure they can see your mouth.
Over the holidays I was mercilessly teased for my diphthongs. Before you imagine something far worse than necessary, let me clarify that a diphthong is a combination of vowel sounds spoken in one syllable—think the “ah-oo” in “cow.” Minnesota where I was raised, monophthongs predominate, particularly the “long o.” A Minnesotan says boat as “b-oh-t,” where many others would use a diphthong “b-oh-oo-t.”
Only four years after trading Minnesota’s mosquitos for Montana’s mountains, diphthongs have weaseled their way into my speech, much to the amusement of my friends and family. My brother mistakenly characterized my new accent as“twang.” My best friend was closer, saying, “You’re adding extra sounds now.”
As with most areas of speech and language, how and why people acquire a second dialect in their native language is a multifactorial process involving linguistic, social, and developmental factors that the speaker may not even be aware of.*
Efficiency
Human beings are masters at getting what we want, when we want it. If someone with a strong accent has to repeat themselves to be understood, they may change their accent out of sheer frustration. In my case, I was perfectly intelligible to people in Montana (though many initially thought I was Canadian), so my accept convergence resulted from other factors.
Age
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It is easier for young children to learn a second language, or second dialect, than for adults. One study found that white women who befriended speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) at younger ages acquired more speech characteristics of AAVE than those who befriended them when they were older.[1]
However, this does not mean adults are incapable of changing their accents. Another study found that adult Canadians living in New York began to differentiate between the vowels in cot and caught, which would be pronounced identically in Canadian (as well as Minnesotan) English.[2] A third study of Canadians in Alabama found similar findings.[3] Remarkably, you do not have to be a speech-language pathologist or linguist to hear these differences. Just as my brother and friend noticed my use of diphthongs, untrained listeners were able to rate the American-ness in the Canadians’ speech.[4]
Prestige
People are more likely to change their accents if the new accent is considered more prestigious. For example, a person who speaks Appalachian English may useStandard English in the workplace. Another example is newscasters adopting a more standard variety of English to reach a broader audience.
Gender
Generally speaking, women tend to be more linguistically innovative than men.[5] If you want to know what people will sound like in the future, listen to teenage girls. Women also tend to more readily acquire prestige dialects, while men may stick with working-class speech.[6] That being said, as gender roles in society continue to change, this tendency may change as well.
Social Connection and Social Distance
Another reason people change their accents is to be accepted into a social group or to emulate someone whom they admire. Simply put, if I like you, I am more prone to talk like you, and if I talk like you, you are more apt to like me. The reverse is also true. If I don’t like you, I will try to distance myself from you by the way I speak.
This phenomenon extends even to the topic of conversation. When speaking of something related to the first dialect, a hometown, for example, the speaker will be more likely to use that dialect if they have positive feelings toward it. If the speaker hated their hometown, however, they may be more apt to use their second dialect when speaking about it.[7]
As society continues to become more mobile, we are likely to see an increase in the number of bi-dialectal speakers. Acquiring a second dialect is a natural, though complex, process, so when one of your friends or relatives returns from a trip abroad with a bit of “twang,” try not to make fun of them too much.
*Note: I have used the terms accent and dialect relatively interchangeably in this post, but they are different. An accent refers strictly to speech sounds, while a dialect is an entire language variation. For example, Minnesotans refer to sugary, carbonated soft drinks as pop, while someone from the South may refer to them as cokes. This is a dialectal variation that has nothing to do with accent.
[1] Fix, Sonya. “Age of Second Dialect Acquisition and Linguistic Practice Across Ethno-Racial Boundaries in the Urban Midwest,” n.d.,12.
[2] Nycz, Jennifer. “NewContrast Acquisition: Methodological Issues and Theoretical Implications.” English Language and Linguistics, Phonological Mergers in English, 17, no. 2(2013): 325–57. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674313000051.
[3] [4] Munro, Murray J, Tracey MDerwing, and James E Flege. “Canadians in Alabama: A Perceptual Study ofDialect Acquisition in Adults.” Journal of Phonetics 27, no. 4 (October1999): 385–403. https://doi.org/10.1006/jpho.1999.0101.
[5] Trudgill, Peter. “Sex, Covert Prestige and Linguistic Change in the Urban British English of Norwich.”Language in Society 1 (October 1, 1972): 179–95.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404500000488.
[6] Nycz, Jennifer. “ChangingWords or Changing Rules? Second Dialect Acquisition and Phonological Representation.” Journal of Pragmatics 52 (2013): 49–62.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2012.12.014.
