A Deaf Adult Speaks Out

3. What Communication Really Is

31What Communication Really Is The peoples of the world, no matter what their cultures and beliefs, will readily identify communication with hearing and speech. This is not surprising since the primary tools of communication throughout the known world are hearing and speech. However, communication is not necessarily limited to hearing and speech. l'he Webster's New World Dictionary succinctly defines communication as "a transmitting; a giving, or giving and receiving, of information, signals, or messages by talk, gestures, writing, etc." The important aspect of the dictionary definition of communication is the transmittal ofinfonnation. Parents and educators working with deaf children frequently fail to understand and appreciate the fact that a child's deafness precludes normal reception of sound impulses, and that visible speech, even under the best possible conditions, permits only a small part of the messages to be understood. Mindel and Vernon have this to say about comprehension of lipreading in Iney Grow in Silence: Edgar Lowell's 1957, 1958, and 1959 studies conducted by the Tracy Clinic illustrated the problems inherent in speechreading. Nondeaf college sophomores who had never studied speechreading were more successful at it than deaf persons to whom it had been taught 18 What Communication Really Is 119 throughout most of their school careers. The better performance by the nondeaf sophomores derived from their normal language base (phonetic, semantic, and syntactic), enabling them to determine by guessing the words they could not speech read. It is helpful to remember that 40 to 60 percent of English sounds are monophonous: their formation on the lips is identical to that of other sounds. A person without an adequate language base to fill in the gaps understands very little. In fact, even the best speechreaders in a one-to-one situation were found to understand only 26 percent of what was said. Many bright deaf individuals grasp less than five percent. (1971, p. 96) Therefore, when you consider untrained and undisciplined deaf infants or small children, it seems to approach the ridiculous if their parents attempt to communicate by talking, talking, and talking to them. For, to many of those without normal hearing, including myself, the lip movements of people talking convey very little meaning. Much of the time we see them only as flapping lips. It is possible for a hearing person to get a little of this sensation by sitting down before the television set and then turning out all the sound. Do this just before an episode starts, and then try following the thread of the plot throughout the story. It takes quite a bit of ingenuity and guesswork to do it satisfactorily. After this little test, it will give the viewer a welcome and comfortable feeling to be able to tune in the sound again and enjoy the television. This would be a good time to pause and reflect that a deaf person cannot and will not ever be able to tune in any sound except, perhaps, for some static. Moreover, the deaf person most likely does not have the background knowledge of language patterns to aid in lipreading that the average hearing viewer has. This is not meant to depreciate the real value of training in speech and speechreading~:'; they have their rightful place in an educational program for deaf children. Yet, the crux of the matter is to get the needed information through to infants and small children who are deaf. Educators have reiterated that the ripest time to start training and educating children is between birth and five years of age. ~:'Speechreading-Takes into consideration the context of the conversation and the natural gestures, facial expreSSIons, and other associational cues and lip movements used by a speaker. 20 IA DEAF ADULT SPEAKS OUT Therefore, the prime concern of the parents of little deaf children should be to get the necessary information through to them before their active little minds are starved from a dearth of incoming data, and possibly become too incapacitated to accept a normal amount of input. Thomas Goulder in the Guest Lecture Series~ 1971~ at the North Carolina School for the Deaf emphasized the importance of having familial comtllunication: Communication courses for parents must begin at the earliest stages of development so that the deaf child becomes a real person within the family and shares in all the joys and sorrows of family. (pp. 133-134) The parents of little deaf children should let their...