The skill of speaking without visibly moving your lips, so that the voice seems to come from somewhere else — usually from a puppet, called a dummy, sitting on the performer's knee. It is an uncountable noun and it names the art or the act, not the person: 'She studied ventriloquism for years', 'a ventriloquism act'. The person is a ventriloquist. The trick works by choosing sounds you can make with the tongue and throat instead of the lips, and by drawing the audience's eyes to the puppet's moving mouth — your ears follow your eyes, so the voice seems to move too. It is a stage and television entertainment, seen at children's parties, in variety shows and in talent competitions. Psychologists borrow the term for the 'ventriloquism effect', where sound seems to come from wherever you see movement — which is why a film's voices seem to come from the actors' mouths on screen and not from the speakers on the wall.

腹語術