HELP FOR THE DEAF

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 147, 16 March 1940, Page 12

HELP FOR THE DEAF

Poor Hearers Become Poor Speakers IMPORTANCE OF TRAINING People who become partly or completely deaf tend to suffer a corresponding impairment of their faculty of speech. In a Centennial Hearing Week address yesterday -Mrs. J. J. Mein. Auckland, said that lip-reading, hearing aids, speech-training exercises, play reading, community singing and the use of instruments to show deafened persons visually the sounds they should make assisted the hard of hearing to retain their speech unimpaired. Mrs. Mein said increased attention was being devoted to speech training in schools. Not only because clear speech was in itself desirable, but also because the ability to speak well gave a means of self expression to a child, built up confidence and poise, and helped to clearer thinking. In connexion with hard-of-hearing people, speech work was being recognized as of increasing importance. ‘When anyone began to lose hearing often his speech suffered. He lost, usually, consonant sounds first, and because he failed to hear word endings he began to drop them in his speech. His words became blurred and his speech less intelligible. One of the best ways of preventing that was to study lip-reading. In lipreading one studied the position of tongue and lips for all the consonant sounds and began to see them as one watched for speech. Unconsciously that usual impression was helping to stimulate the memory for sounds. Especially where deafness was severe there was loss of control of volume. The hard-of-hearing person spoke so quietly that he could not be heard or so loudly in moments of excitement that he became conspicuous. The best means of helping to overcome that was the group hearing aid, which transmitted the voice without distortion so that the memory of normal speech sound was kept fresh. As long as that happened normality of voice was possible. The hard of hearing could benefit immensely by using group hearing aids and carefully chosen individual hearing aids. Community singing was one of the finest exercises, specially when songs that the singers knew before they lost their, hearing were sung. By that natural use of the voice its flexibility and tone could be retained. Speech-training exercises and play readings all gave an outlet and a self-expression and a confidence that the person so often lost when he lost his hearing. The third way in which the deafened person was most noticeably affected was in loss of variety of pitch. To cure that a new instrument had been introduced in Now Zealand. It had a vertical row' of 15 different coloured lights, each light representing a certain pitch of sound. A.s one spoke into the microphone change of pitch was shown by the lighting of one after another of the lights, so one could repeat the same phrase with different intonation and the difference was shown by the different way in which the lamps- lit up. It was designed in the first place to help the deaf child to understand what was meant by a high sound or a low sound, but it had been used and adapted for teaching elocution and speech training in hearing schools. Its advantages in helping * to overcome monotony of speech were tremendous.