Lip reading with an accent

My husband' s grandmother (English) is really hard of hearing, so she relies on a combination of her hearing & lip reading to understand people. She can understand everyone but me, it is a real struggle for her to get what I'm saying. We've come up with a theory that it is because of my accent, that since I pronounce word differently, my mouth would move differently than an English person saying the same word. I wonder if that's right? It's something that never occurred to me before, and then I wondered if someone who relied solely on lip reading would struggle to understand people with very different accents than those people that they are used to seeing on a daily basis? Hmmmmm....

Wow.. would never have thought of that either.  Very interesting.. it must have at least some effect on it??

Definitely makes sense...say the word dog...like dawg or like doug...you'll notice that your mouth changes position...not hugely but enough that it would look different to someone who reads lips.

Accents do in fact impare lip readers.

At my last job I was a supervisor to a lip reader. She had such a hard time understanding me and informed me she never did good with any sort of accents. She would sometimes even have a hard time with regional accents.

I never thought of it, but obviously, it's true.

When Emma Thompson did the film Primary Colors, she said that she didn't like speaking with an American accent because we use more of our mouth muscles to speak and it made her face hurt! 

Did you hear the story today about how ducks quack with an accent? That 'quacked' me up,,, oh groan,,, even I have to roll my eyes at that LOL

The lip reading makes sense to me too. Phonetically, you would physically hold your mouth and tongue differently if you pronounce words differently than American, or such.

Does make a lot of sense!
The quack story...when I heard it it was read by a newsreader who giggled at the thought of London ducks being much louder than the other regional ducks.

The deaf bit of this thread reminds me of an email my sister sent me containing a conversation she and my mother recently had...my mother is hard of hearing:

"I discovered the cat is totally deaf - that is why she sleeps so soundly.  However, she is still eating, using the catbox, and coming to be petted (and bugging the dog) so she has a few more miles (or yards) in her. 

Our conversation when I discovered the cat's hearing loss - granted, I was speaking from another room:

me:  The cat is deaf.
Mother: What?  The cat is dead?!
me:  No, the cat is DEAF.
Mother:  She's DEAD?
me:  THE CAT CAN'T HEAR
Mother:  The cat's not here?"

me:  The cat is deaf.
Mother: What?  The cat is dead?!
me:  No, the cat is DEAF.
Mother:  She's DEAD?
me:  THE CAT CAN'T HEAR
Mother:  The cat's not here?"

ROFL! Shades of 'Who's on First?' LOL