Advanced Lipreading Exercise: Ozzie Guillen

In this chapter of Advanced Lipreading, we’re considering some of the difficulties posed to lipreaders by non-native speakers of English. Below are three such real-life examples, with Miami Marlins baseball manager Ozzie Guillen.

Guillen is a native of Venezuela, and, while he’s a fluent speaker of English, has preserved many of the phonological traits of South American Spanish, which can present ambiguities in the labiodental fricative, for example, and the palato-alveolar sibilant — and similar distortions in the corresponding visemes of those sounds.

Here are videos of three separate speech acts by Guillen, with the relevant text below each. (Note: click on the GIFs for unadulterated viewing.)

Example No. 1

Video:

Translation: “I respect you as a person!”

Example No. 2

Video:

Translation: “I’m in love with my job, professionally!”

Example No. 3

Video:

Translation: “You have the rest of my quiche.”