DEAFNESS IN CHILDREN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 254, 26 October 1937, Page 3

DEAFNESS IN CHILDREN

A Teaching Experiment

DEAF are among the neglected of medicine. Too often nothing can bo done to diminish their deafness by medical treatment, and all that remains is to mitigate the disability by means of instrumental help or special Education. Deaf children have long teen understood and educated by specially trained teachers. Deaf adults, misguided by advertisements, have usually been left to wander unadvised to purveyors of hearing-aids. Often they become disappointed, introverted and bad-tempered. Both children and adults need more help from medical science than has been their share in the past.” Such is the situation as described by the Medical Research Council in its preface to the Report just issued on the results of two years’ investigation of hearing and speech in deaf children. The aim of the investigation was threefold: to measure defects in bearing, to express the relation between deafness and speech, and to estimate the benefit of magnified sounds to severely deaf children. A great deal of the earlier work was concerned with technique—establishing the reharility and the meaning of mtasuremen'* obtained with such instruments as the pure tone audiometer, the gramophone audiometer and calibrated tuning forks. Observations showed that any ability io hear the human voice at all, either

directly or by means of sound amplification, oiade a great difference to the speech of the children. During the second yen., an experiment was conducted with special classes in the London schools for the deaf, in which half the children were supplied with earphones from a sound magnifying instrument on the teacher’s desk and the other half received the same teaching without any hearing aid. The children were matched as far as possible in pairs of similar age and intelligence and with similar hearing defects. The teaching was along the usual lines, and was not modified in any way for the benefit of the children who were using the instrument. By the end of the year there was little doubt that the use of sound am plification made a great difference both in the speech of the pupils who used the earphones, and in their general educational progress. It was estimated that only in cases of very severe deafness—about nine per cent, of the total —could no benefit at all be expected from the use of sound amplification in the class room. There are something like 4,000 children in the country who are deaf enough to require education in special schools at public expense. The apparatus for electrical sound magnification is not cheap, but it is difficult to escape the conclusion that an effort should be made to supply it in all schools for the deaf.