Visible Speech - A Fresh Take On Pronunciation For The Deaf

A Fresh Take On Pronunciation For The Deaf

Alexander Graham Bell later devised another system of visual cues that also came to be known as visible speech, yet this system did not use symbols written on paper to teach deaf people how to pronounce words. Instead, Graham Bell's system, developed at his Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C., involved the use of a spectrograph, a device that makes "visible records of the frequency, intensity, and time analysis of short samples of speech". The spectrograph device translated aural acoustic sounds into readable patterns via a photographic process. This system was based on the idea that the eye should be able to read patterns of vocalizations in much the same way that the ear translates these vocalizations into meaning.