DEAFNESS IN CHILDREN

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 142, 3 July 1937, Page 11

DEAFNESS IN CHILDREN

A Teaching Experiment

DEAF are among the negleeted of medicine. Too often nothing can be 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 been 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 put." Such is the situation as deseribed 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 xelation belween deafness - and speech, and to estimatc the benefit of magnined sounds to severely deaf children. A great deai ot the earlier work was coneerned with technique — establishing the roliafcility and the meaning of measurements obtalned with such instruments as thc puro tono andfomctor, the. gramopl.one audiometcr and calibrated luning forks. Ob&crvations sbowcd that any abilUy to hcar tho hunian voico at all, eillicr

directly or by means of sound aniplification, Diade a great ditferonce to ihe speech of the cliildren.During the second year, an experi* ment was conducted with special classes iD the London schools for the deaf, in which half the children were supplied with earphones from a sound maguifying instrument on the teacher's desk and the other half receive.d 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 usualIines, 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 amplification cnade a great difference both iu the speech of the pupils who used the earphones, and in their general educational progress. It was estimated that only in cases of very scvere deafness — about nine per cent. of the total —could no benefit at all be expected from the use of sound amplification in the class rdom. There aro something liko 4,000 children in tho eountry who are deaf enough to require education in special schools at pnblic expcnse. The apparalus for electrical sound magnification is not cheap, but it is diJ'licult to escapo Ihe conclusion tliat an oiTort should bc : raado to aupply it iu ull schools for the deaf.