The child's hearing for speech / by Mary D. Sheridan.

  • Mary Sheridan
Date:
[1948]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The child's hearing for speech / by Mary D. Sheridan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Joan aged 6, in an Infant School. I was told she had never spoken but could make ‘ grunty noises’, and her teachers were convinced that she could hear. She came when she was called. She showed every sign of understanding simple questions and commands. I verified this by making various noises behind her back at distances ranging from one to 10 feet, and it was when she turned to me with that same bright-eyed, questioning smile that I was struck by her resemblance to the Hoylake case. Her elder sister was a certified mental defective and it appeared only too obvious that Joan was also mentally retarded. For three years I kept her under observ- ation. She was no trouble in school, cheerful and amiable with her companions, clean in her habits, quick in her actions and neat with her fingers; but apart from shouting sometimes in the playground and uttering those ‘ grunts ’, which I now realize to have been vague and toneless vowel sounds modified by one or two labial consonants, she made no attempt at articulate speech. At 9 years old, since it was obvious that she could not possibly follow the ordinary curri- culum of the Junior School, I reluctantly certified her mentally defective, and she was transferred to the same special school her sister had attended. In the special school, with its superior opportunities for indi- vidual observation, it was soon realized that in general behaviour, muscular control and handwork she was vastly superior to the other children, and that, although she »could certainly hear some sounds, she was apparently deaf to speech. It was decided to send her to the Manchester University for a hearing test. Her audiogram showed that she had only islands of hearing and was therefore com- pletely deaf to certain tones of the speech range. She was immedi- ately de-certified and admitted to the Royal Manchester School for the Deaf. Two years later I saw the child being taught, with a group of others, by Dr. and Mrs. Ewing’s combined lip-reading and hearing-aid methods [1]. She recognized me as soon as I entered although it was so long since she had seen me, and she gave me one of her old eager smiles. Her teachers said the child was acutely intelligent with a distinct gift for mathematics. It caused me considerable distress to realize that if I had recognized the case earlier as one of deafness she would have had several extra years of expert teaching. But without the specialized knowledge I now possess, and in view of the family history of mental defect, the mistake was a natural one, and I fear it may have been made, in spite of all their care and devotion, in many other places by many other school medical officers. The mystery of that child in Hoylake was at last illumined, and I realized that the mother had not been inventing the child’s words ‘water cold’ (as I had ignorantly believed) but merely improving them. Harvey Fletcher [2] has shown that ‘o:’ (‘aw’) is the
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