I recently saw ads for an app that was basically speech therapy for small children, being marketed as a game. There was a cartoon face and a real child’s face on the screen, saying words and moving their mouths in slightly exaggerated, very visible ways. The app was interactive and the small child using the app had to imitate the shape of the mouth and say the word, and then they would get a reward (a scoring token).
I thought it was a great idea, but it’s really tragic that it should be necessary. Small children haven’t seen real faces and real lips speaking most of their lives, and now they need speech therapy to learn basic language skills.
Think of all the hearing disabled kids, that aren’t disabled enough to need sign language.
The ones that need to lip-read in order to understand what is being said to them.