Theoretical considerations of phoneme construction were explored and a study was made of phoneme efficiency for deaf communication in Finland which utilized 128 deaf pupils (77 boys and 51 girls from grades 3 to 8 and from ages 8 to 15). The main factors of defective production were found in visual reception. It was concluded that, on the average, vowels had a pre- and post-factum influence upon consonants; when the lip opening became smaller, the intelligibility of consonants decreased. Tests gave the average possibility of a deaf person receiving or producing an ordinary Finnish word correctly with the country's present oral training at about 10 to 25% when only intraphoneme cues were used. Following an analysis of the present methods of speech education for the deaf, two improvements were suggested, accompanied by supporting experiments: an analytic method for training of phoneme communication; and individualization and standardization of visiophonemes in order to make visiospeech completely perceptible. With 15 hours training, children improved 74% in phonemes and 350% in sentence recognition. Implications for the future for education of the deaf born and use of visiophonemes in other than hearing problems are also explored. (JB)