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3. SPEECH AND LIPREADING
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===============3=============== SPEECH AND LIPREADING In order to understand the nature and scope of total communication , it is necessary first to understand its constituent parts. In order to assess the value of the different media , it is necessary to know something of their linguistic qualities. It should be asked whether they are themselves languages or codes for transmitting language, and whether they contribute to language acquisition or are of use mainly for subsequent language communication. With these questions in mind, the main linguistic media involved in total communication can be considered. In people with normal hearing, one usually thinks of expression and reception of speech-speaking, or articulation , and hearing, or listening. For deaf people, one must also consider the additional "special" aspect-visual reception of speech by lipreading. This chapter deals with speech and lipreading. The main manual media, fingerspelling and signing, are examined in the following chapters. Research is reviewed that helps the understanding of the formational properties and perceptual parameters of these systems and tells something about their communicative efficiency and developmental effects with deaf children. In practice, these systems are intended to represent spoken language (or its written form), or to act as a substitute or supplement for spoken language. These different media are discussed in relation to English, but it is important to realize that there might be some differences in relation to other spoken languages. SPEECH A principal tenet of the oral philosophy is that speech, as the natural language medium in hearing children , should also be the medium for language acquisition, communication, and learning in deaf children. Total com- 32 Total Communication munication also places high value on speech, but in combination with additional forms of communication. Partially hearing, or hard of hearing, children with substantial residual hearing might be capable of developing speech and language largely along natural lines by hearing and imitating the speech around them. Thus, they should be able to benefit from pure oral education. As we are not specifically concerned with such children, detailed aspects of aural reception of speech will not be dealt with here. A proper understanding of the background to hearing loss and the stimulation of residual hearing through auditory amplification and training should be more appropriately gained from textbooks in the well-established field of audiology. This study of total communication is concerned with children who need access to manual communication because they cannot understand speech adequately through hearing. The discussion of speech will be centered on the problems of expressive speech and the visual reception of speech through lipreading. Little detailed objective study has been done of the expressive speech of deaf children. The available evidence from research simply confirmed that deaf children had immense difficulty in acquiring speech and that only a small proportion of children with severe congenital hearing loss attained expressive intelligibility, that is, speech that could be easily understood by others. The evidence of an objective survey, from an impeccable source, the Department of Education and Science (1964), provided a picture of the speech of hearing-impaired adolescents in British schools at a time when priority was given to education through oral communication. The conversational speech of the children was graded, by the same assessor throughout, into intelligible, partly intelligible, and unintelligible categories. Of those children with mean hearing losses in excess of 80 decibels, more than 88 percent had speech that was not wholly intelligible; about 45 percent [35.169.107.177] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:00 GMT) Speech and Lipreading 33 had speech rated as partly intelligible, although, in most cases, not likely to be understood by people unfamiliar with deaf children. In another British study, Markides (1970) recorded the spontaneous speech of deaf and partially hearing children. Lay persons unfamiliar with deaf children listened to the recordings and reported the words they understood. For the deaf children, more than 80 percent of the words were not correctly recognized. Of all the children, deaf and partially hearing, about two-thirds had speech which was either unintelligible or very difficult to follow. A similar effect was reported in an American study. Levitt (1976) recorded the speech of deaf adolescents who were asked to describe verbally short picture sequences. The speech of about 75 percent of the subjects was graded as either unintelligible or very difficult to understand. In a more extensive study, Jensema, Karchmer, and Trybus (1978) obtained teacher ratings for nearly 1,000 hearing-impaired children. They analyzed the results by degree of hearing loss. Of...