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words which are phonemically similar to each other ('lexical neighbors', such as spit/sip/sit/stick...etc.), others are unlike all other words: they are 'unique' in terms of the distribution of their phonemes ('umbrella' may be an example). Skilled users of the language bring this knowledge to bear when interpreting speech, so it is generally harder to identify a heard word with many lexical neighbors than one with few neighbors. Applying this insight to seen speech, some words in the language can be unambiguously lip-read even when they contain

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