Isolation isn’t conducive to writing about communication difficulties. Since communication difficulties are what this blog is about, I haven’t written much in recent months.
I’m getting along just fine with no one to talk to. I’m hearing well. Or at least I feel like I’m hearing well. But that’s because everything I hear – the television, the telephone, Zoom calls – is captioned. When I can see the words, I can also hear them.
That seeing enhances hearing is a well known phenomenon, which I’ve written about in the past. Researchers call it the McGurk effect, named after one of the British scientists who discovered in the 1970s that people comprehend speech better if they also see it. They called it “hearing lips and seeing voices.”
This is why good communication strategies are important. It’s why we need to make sure we can see a speaker in order to hear them. We all intuitively speech read. The speaker’s facial expressions contribute to our comprehension. How the words are formed in the mouth and on the lips is also important, which is why we used to call it lipreading. Now we know that lipreading is augmented by facial expression and body language, and we call it speechreading.
I’m a good speechreader, but only if I can also hear what’s being said. If I hit the trifecta — hear the speaker, see the speaker, AND get captions — I hear perfectly! Fortunately for me, that’s often the case with virtual meetings and conversations.
There are times when captions fail me, however, especially with live TV. I like to watch the network news to catch up on the day. One network, my favorite, has terrible captioning. The captions routinely start stuttering, the same few words repeated over and over again while the speakers cluelessly move on. Eventually I give up and change the channel. Readers if you also have this experience, is it worse on a particular network? I’m reluctant to slam mine, but feel free chime in.
This network is presumably using ASR — Automatic Speech Recognition. Unfortunately the network’s system can’t even recognize the names of the network’s star correspondents. Far superior is CART captioning — Communication Access Real Time Translation. It would seem well worth the small investment in a good CART captioner. Networks, listen up! increase your viewership. The same problem exists, by the way, with live sports captioning.
Maybe I AM hearing better. Without the anxiety and stress of trying to hear and understand all day — trying to communicate — I’m more relaxed. These past few months, as bad as they’ve been, have for me included one benefit, a big benefit. I can hear.
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Here is a link for filing a complaint to the FCC. You will not be able to complain about a recurring problem, just one specific station/show on one specific date. So if you are trying to watch NBC Nightly News, for instance, you will have to choose one specific date and time to complain about.