Many deaf people wear hearing aids. If they aren't profoundly deaf, hearing aids can make lipreading a lot easier.
Deaf people converse in many ways.
Two of the most common ways are sign language
and lipreading.
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Sign language is the way that many
deaf people talk with each other. Many of the Deaf in our country
consider American Sign Language to be their primary language and
think of English as a "second language." In American Sign Language
(ASL) there are signs for most words. Words that don't have a sign
are "fingerspelled" using a group of signs called the "manual
alphabet" which represent individual letters. |
| Lipreading
is another of the ways deaf people converse. A few
people call this "speechreading," because it really involves a
lot more than just the lips. It involves observing the
speaker's whole face and, in fact, the whole body and surroundings.
Even then, it's difficult to do and misunderstandings are
frequent. Many deaf people wear hearing aids. If they aren't profoundly deaf, hearing aids can make lipreading a lot easier. |
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Hearing and Hearing Loss | Causes of Deafness | Sign Language | Living With Deafness| About the Authors | Notes, Letters, and Posted Questions