Deafness in the school child : a lecture delivered to the teachers of the Glasgow School Board in the Glasgow High School on 18th February, 1909 / by James Kerr Love.

  • Love, James Kerr, 1858-1942
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Deafness in the school child : a lecture delivered to the teachers of the Glasgow School Board in the Glasgow High School on 18th February, 1909 / by James Kerr Love. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    present forms of speech are, in comparison, recent, and all forms of writing as of yesterday. Primitive human speech was probably developed from a system of calls and a kind of chatter such as exists among the higher animals of to-day, and an existing motor centre was put to a new use. The motor centre or centres for the control of the muscles of the lips, tongue, and throat had parts of their substance gradually set apart for the modification of the voice in speech, and either in it or in an associated centre the power to record the memory of the words produced and learnt became estab- lished. No new cohesion or association of centres by tracts of fibres was necessary; aS voice became articulate and speech became precise, old centres enlarged to meet new needs. But the acquisition. of speech made higher thought possible by giving an exact means of expressing it, and by making the expression of abstract ideas possible. By signs and gestures, even when aided by inarticulate vocal utterance, only the immediate wants of an animal can be expressed, and amongst the deaf in our own time gesture language is not capable of expressing exact thought or abstract idea. It is upon this acquisition of speech, say after the age of fifteen to eighteen months, that the rapid mental development takes place, which, even before he goes to school at the age of five or six years, places the child far ahead of the most advanced and experienced animal. It was the acquisition of speech by primitive man which made his rapid advance in mental power possible, and which in the brain is shown by the greater relative bulk of the cerebrum. This setting aside of parts of existing centres for highly specialised purposes has been repeated in the history of the human race. <A part of the auditory centre has been set apart for word-hearing and a part of the visual centre for word-seeing ; and, when we come to study the phenomena of word-deafness and word-blindness we shall see that these are quite compatible with otherwise perfect sight and hearing. The acquisition of speech by the race has been attended by some relative disadvantage. Equipped with his higher power for the exact expression of thought and feeling, the need for the great acuteness of the other senses, such as smell, became less. The sense of smell in the dog and deer is infinitely more acute than in man, and the eye as an optical instrument is in many ways far inferior in man to what obtains in some families of the lower creation; but the possession of speech, which has rendered the exercise of smell and sight for the purposes of self-preservation less necessary, has conferred on man advantages which far outweigh these relative losses.
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