Science: Visible Speech

Bell Telephone Co. paid a yo-year-old debt last week. Alexander Graham Bell was really studying the problems of the deaf when he happened to invent the telephone. Now the telephone company, grown great on his sideline invention, has developed a method of making speech visible, so that the totally deaf can read it.

Speech has been recorded before, but no one could actually read the wiggly groove of a phonograph record or the uneven ladder of a movie sound track. The various sounds which combine to form human speech were too jumbled up. Bell’s new apparatus takes the sounds of speech apart and prints them at different levels (see cut).

The result is a phonetic “alphabet” showing the timing, the pitch, the overtones, even the delicate emphasis of each spoken sound. The streaks and blotches near the top of the strip represent the high-pitched elements; those near the bottom, the low-pitched. A trained eye can easily read this “visible speech.”

Most immediate use of visible speech will be in teaching the totally deaf to talk. Normal children learn to talk by listening to and copying the speech of grownups. But the average deaf child, who cannot hear his own or another’s voice, learns only about 50 words in his first three years in a special school.

Bell’s gadget may change all this. On a luminous screen, a deaf person can see his own spoken words and compare them with the pictured speech of an instructor. This allows him to improve his speech by imitation and by trial & error.