Remote Study as a Modern Format to Improve Our Lip-Reading Skills (Based on our Homovisemes Corpus)

Abstract

This article continues our work, where we describe possible barriers for a person with hearing impairments to visually perceive and understanding verbal speech by observing the speaker's articulations. It is difficult to correctly understand visual information since one viseme corresponds to several phonemes. This affects how different words with similar articulation patterns (homovisemes) form up in verbal speech. These words are defined by the term "homovisemes" introduced by the authors. There are many such words in Russian speech. So, these words are interchangeable and thus indistinguishable from each other, not only out of context, but sometimes even when a context is available. The purpose of this research is to analyze if it is possible and expedient to use our homovisemes corpus to solve certain difficulties in how we learn to read from lips. Currently, one of the promising areas in education is remote study. In the article, we investigate how to use a distance form to analyze a structure of lip-reading based on our homovisemes corpus of Russian. This corpus is based on our prepared material, grouped into separate chains according to the principle of identical articulatory shells of words; pseudo-words are excluded. It is intended to familiarize the user with homovisemes in oral Russian speech. This will allow him to replenish his vocabulary and easily visually perceive an oral message. We present examples of possible variants of recognized words with similar visemes based on our developed corpus. Our results allow us to conclude on how relevant the chosen topic is. The results will help us to predict uncertainty when we choose the right value. Remote study is a modern study format. It is aimed to develop personal abilities of people with hearing impairments, to improve their skills to understand oral utterance, and to socially adapt these people in our society.

Keywords

• visual recognition of spoken language
• visemes
• homovisemes
• pseudowords
• remote study
• corpus approach