Table of the sounds and their corresponding visual cues for the English consonants that help identify the consonant when only the visible speech from the face is present. A + means that the cues occur for that sound. Nasality is signaled by the top red disk; Frication is signaled by the middle white disk; and Voicing is signaled by the bottom blue disk. Manner will be indicated by four additional cues, 1 = stop, 2 = frication, 3 = glide, and 4 = vowel.
| Sound | word | Nasality | Frication | Voicing |
| p | Pay | - | + | - |
| b | Bee | - | - | + |
| m | Me | + | - | - |
| t | Too | - | + | - |
| d | Day | - | - | + |
| n | No | + | - | - |
| k | Key | - | + | - |
| g | Go | - | - | + |
| ng | Sing | + | - | - |
| th | Thin | - | + | - |
| dh | Then | - | - | + |
| f | For | - | + | - |
| v | Vote | - | - | + |
| s | See | - | + | - |
| z | Zoo | - | - | + |
| sh | She | - | + | - |
| zh | Azure | - | - | + |
| j | You | - | - | + |
| Jh | Judge | + | ||
| ch | Church | - | + | - |
| hh | He | - | + | - |
| l | Let | - | - | + |
| r | Read | - | - | + |
| w | We | - | - | + |
When these cues are combined with lipreading (called speechreading because it contains other facial information other than the lips), it is possible to learn how to understand what is being spoken from the face alone. The visual cues come on only during consonants. Vowels can usually be distinguished from just the face. These visual cues allow the perceiver to know more or less exactly what word was presented when simply watching the face. For example, the words bet and met are characterized by a closed mouth at the onset of the sound. This allows the perceiver to distinguish them from debt or get but not from each other because they look identical. However, the nasal cue at the beginning of the word met would eliminate bet as a viable alternative. A similar story can be told for other pairs such as bag and bang or fan and fad. Pairs of words can also be distinguished on the basis of voicing and frication. The word half ends in frication whereas the word halve ends in voicing. Other word pairs can actually have two or more places in the word to distinguish between two possible alternatives. For example, dip and Tim look alike but dip has voicing at the beginning and no nasality at the end of the word whereas Tim has no voicing at the beginning and nasality at the end.
We can look at different subsets of these sounds in terms of how they look on the face and the disk cues they are paired with.
For abrupt sounds, we can create a 3 by 3 table giving how they look on the face and the disk cues they are paired with.
| Closed lips | Open Mouth | Open Wider Mouth | |
| Red Nasal | M | N | NG |
| White Noise | P | T | K |
| Blue Voice | B | D | G (hard g as in girl) |
Then we have several pairs
| White Noise | Blue Voice | |
| Tongue between teeth | Th as in thin | Dh as in then |
| Teeth over lower lip | F as in for | V as in vote |
| Spread lips | S as in see | Z as in zoo |
| Protruded lips | Sh as in she | Zh as in azure |
| Protruded lips | Ch as in church | Zh as in judge |
| H | H as in he | |
| Spread lips | J as in you | |
| Lateral Open mouth | L as in Let | |
| Open mouth | R as in rat | |
| Open and spread mouth | W as in we |
Some of the last segments are difficult to see on the face but there are subtle cues and the disk cues will help you.