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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    then giving every child in the ‘subnormal’ group an individual pure-tone test.. He kindly gave me facilities to examine all these cases, and so I was enabled, for the first time so far as I could discover, to analyse the speech of a large group of ‘ hard-of-hearing ’ children (100), and to compare each child’s phonetic usage with a scientific record of his hearing. In the meantime I had been studying something of the physics of sound, the psychology of hearing, the science of phonetics, the history and philosophy of language, and the art of elocution; and as my eyes became keener to watch the movements of the mouth in speech and my ear more sensitive to note the finer distinctions in vocal sounds, several interesting facts began to emerge. It was found, for instance, that children, unless they are very hard of hearing, rarely omit a sound, except those terminal t’s and d’s of which I have spoken; they usually replace it with another sound which to them (and this is an important point), if not actually a satis- factory substitute, is at least a sufficient one. It was necessary to chart these substitutions, which, as most speech therapists know, are fairly constant—‘ t’ for ‘k’, for instance, ‘w’ for ‘r’, ‘f’ for ‘th’. The question for me was why were these substitutions sufficient to the child? Was the reason auditory, visual, muscular or tactile ? The psychiatrists speak of ‘ emotional blocks’ which interrupt normal physiological processes, and I have, in the course of twenty years’ practice among children, encountered a few cases of hysterical mutism, but none in the period under review ; and I wish firmly to state that, in my opinion, although it is possible that some as yet undetermined psychological factor may be involved (if the word * psychological ’ means a physiological and not a pathological mental process), none of the substitutions and omissions analysed in my research were due to any purely emotional cause. It is true that the persistence into the school age of certain recognized phonetic patterns which are characteristic of ‘ baby speech’ may occur even in intelligent children who are encouraged by the mother’s foolish desire to perpetuate the child’s infantile habits of dependence upon her, but such cases rapidly improve once they reach school. These cases are referred to in more detail later. In my experience the children most likely to persist in baby speech are the neglected, the spoilt, the mentally retarded and the partially deaf, and boys far more frequently than girls. Through the whole period under review, and in all the various groups analysed, the boys consistently showed a greater tendency to defective speech than the girls. I cannot believe that the addi- tional ‘ spoiling’ that is always lavished upon the sons by mothers accounts for all this sex difference in speech defect after the beginning of school life. I think, with Professor Burt, that girls have
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