MAKING THE DEAF HEAR.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LII, Issue 142, 18 May 1932, Page 2

MAKING THE DEAF HEAR.

NOVEL MACHINE TESTED.

For the first time in their lives a few deaf children in Melbourne the other day heard sounds through the earpiece of a machine. They were toddlers, from four to five years old, at the Victorian Deaf and Dumb Institution. Tho machine, which penetrated their silence, was an audiometer. Tho superintendent of the institution, Mr W. J. McCaskill, said that the value of such an instrument was in its use as a gauge of the degree of the child’s deafness. In many cases there were “islands of sound” — tonal regions in which the deaf child could hear. A knowledge of these helped in the grading of classes to learn speech. “Those who can hear the' higher vibrations, which enable them to distinguish a high pitched ‘ee,’ can often be taught to speak quite well,” Mr McCaskill said. There are boys and girls at the institution who can speak distinctly and well; they have never heard the sound of a voice.” The machine that measures deafness looks like a neatly elaborate portable radio. Switches regulate a scale of eight tones —transmitted through an earpiece—and the volume. An exact reading, up the scale, can be registered on a graph for each test. Excitement ruled when some of the children were brought in for testing. They saw the machine as a new game. Eagerly holding the microphone to their ears, they smiled with delight if the sounds came through to them. By signs they indicated to Mr McCaskill that they heard. In the classrooms of their school, where they are taught by lip-reading to speak, the children are amazingly eager for contact with the world that moves outside their silence. A teacher in one class recently asked his small pupils, “Who opened the Sydney Harbour Bridge?” A dozen pairs of eyes ■ solemnly followed the movement of his lips. Then one small reader of newspapers marched up to the blackboard and wrote: “Mister De Groot.” Twelye small faces lit up in silent enjoyment.