visible speech

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Related to visible speech: Alexander Melville Bell

visible speech

A system of phonetic notation used as an aid for teaching speech to hearing-impaired people and consisting of diagrams of the organs of speech in the various positions required to articulate sounds.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

visible speech

(Phonetics & Phonology) a system of phonetic notation invented by Alexander Melville Bell (1819–1905) that utilized symbols based on the schematic representation of the articulations used for each speech sound

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

vis′ible speech′

1. a system of phonetic symbols developed by Alexander Melville Bell in 1867 to represent the position of the speech organs in articulating sounds.

2. the visual representation of characteristics of speech, as by sound spectrograms.

[1850–55]

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Noun	1.	visible speech - a phonetic alphabet invented by Melville Bell in the 19th century phonetic alphabet, sound alphabet - an alphabet of characters intended to represent specific sounds of speech
	2.	visible speech - spectrogram of speech; speech displayed spectrographically spectrogram, spectrograph - a photographic record of a spectrum

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And so, to save his life, he and his father and mother set sail from Glasgow and came to the small Canadian town of Brantford, where for a year he fought down his tendency to consumption, and satisfied his nervous energy by teaching "Visible Speech" to a tribe of Mohawk Indians.

He had not been forgetful of "Visible Speech" all this while, but had been making experiments with two remarkable machines--the phonautograph and the manometric capsule, by means of which the vibrations of sound were made plainly visible.

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We'll set her talking; and I'll take it down first in Bell's visible Speech; then in broad Romic; and then we'll get her on the phonograph so that you can turn her on as often as you like with the written transcript before you.