This session will attempt to revive our language learning before the age of 12 months. Reading mother’s lips had already started at 3 months and we can still bring it back. The diagram shows the easiest of the 14 “visemes”. If you have time, try an online lip-reading test.
Listening for the phonology of our mother tongue was intense until we had acquired all 44 phonemes by about 12 months, after which we lost interest and moved onto syllables.
Motherese uses pairs of the baby’s first consonants, usually a bilabial, plus a vowel. CV pairs are reduplicated by the primary caregiver in similar ways around the world. The diagram shows Motherese for Mandarin (as near as I can hear it).
A couple of hours of practice can allow us to “workaround” hearing loss. When we meet, you can try to discriminate the “wh” word by lips only. In Ablaut order (?) these are: when, which, where, why, how, what, who.
At alter date we could try workaround strategies for speech loss. BSL provides a lexicon of fairly intuitive signs, which you might master in five hours. Perhaps 30 have a 2/3 chance of being understood by an untrained normally hearing person. After that mime by charades may be more useful.