Interlingual Homonymy Hinders Communication when a Person Reads Foreign Words from the Lips (from the Position of a Native Russian Speaker)

Abstract

Of all the sounds perceived by a person, the most important for him or her, of course, are the sounds of speech; these sounds allow people to communicate with each other. A person may become socially isolated in case he fails to communicate with native or foreign speakers if he looses hearing. A prerequisite to integrate a hearing-impaired person into the society is to improve their ability to visual perceive speech, i.e. to read words from the speaker’s lips. A person can visually perceive articulated speech to communicate with other people; this is an effective but difficult way to communicate. This happens because the communication process is accompanied by a number of problems caused by homonymous words in speech. The formal similarity between the phonetic and articulation shells of words with different meanings is misleading. The similarity also suggests the words are interchangeable, so the meaning of the words gets distorted. The paper investigates lexical homonymy as a barrier between people to communicate when they read from lips. To investigate the intralingual and interlingual lexical homonyms, we compare speech elements of the Russian language and a number of foreign languages. We review the dictionaries of the most common languages in order to identify interlingual homonyms in the dictionaries, similar to the words of the Russian language with phonetic and articulatory shells. We compared homonyms of these languages to analyze the issues of formal similarity and differences at the lexical level of homonyms. We present an example of how to compute the probability to correctly recognize homonymous words of the Russian language by their graphemes, phonemes, and visemes. We draw attention to read intra-language homonyms from the lips. For this we worked out an example of the homonyms of Russian language. Also, we emphasize inter-language homonyms as people verbally communicate in different language systems. We briefly describe a multimedia program to teach users to read from lips. The program reveals the nuances of words with similar visemes of different language systems and controls if the users correctly recognize the visemes.

Keywords

• homonymy
• interlingual homonymy
• visual perception of speech
• lip reading
• articulatory drawing
• visemes
• homovisemes
• uncertainty
• multimedia training program