Deafness:
Deafness is a condition wherein the ability to detect certain frequencies of sound is completely or partially impaired.
Hearing Hearing (or audition) is the ability to perceive sound by detecting vibrations through an organ such as the ear. It is one of the traditional five senses. The inability to hear is called Deafness. In humans and other vertebrates, hearing is performed primarily by the auditory system: vibrations are detected by the ear and transduced into nerve impulses that are perceived by the brain (primarily in the temporal lobe). Like touch, audition requires sensitivity to the movement of molecules in the world outside the organism. Both hearing and touch are types of mechanosensation.
The Hearing mechanism: The eardrum of an ear simplifies incoming air pressure waves to a single channel of amplitude. In the inner ear, the distribution of vibrations along the length of the basilar membrane is detected by hair cells. The location and intensity of vibrations in the basilar membrane is transmitted to the brain through the auditory nerve.
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The impairment Hearing sensitivity is indicated by the quietest sound that anyone can detect, called the hearing threshold. There are two aspects of hearing impairment. Firstly, there is one of hearing sensitivity, wherein one has the difficulty to detect sounds that are distant (based on amplitude) or the pitch and loudness and softness. The second aspect of hearing involves speech perception. This is the ability to understand speech, and not to merely hear the sound.
CLASSIFICATION ON HEARING IMPAIRMENT CAN BE MADE INTO: -Conductive and Sensorineural -Age of onset -By the severity A conductive hearing impairment is an impairment resulting from dysfunction in any of the mechanisms that normally conduct sound waves through the outer ear, the eardrum or the bones of the middle ear. A sensorineural hearing impairment is one resulting from dysfunction in the inner ear, especially the cochlea where sound vibrations are converted into neural signals, or in any part of the brain that subsequently processes these signals.
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The severity of a hearing impairment is ranked according to the additional intensity above a nominal threshold that a sound must be before being detected by an individual; it is (measured in decibels of hearing loss, or dB HL). Hearing impairment may be ranked as mild, moderate, moderately severe, severe or profound as defined below:
MILD: for adults: between 26 and 40 dB HL for children: between 20 and 40 dB HL MODERATE: between 41 and 55 dB HL MODERATELY SEVERE : between 56 and 70 dB HL The age of onset is crucial for the acquisition of a spoken language: Pre-lingual Deafness:
Prelingual deafness is hearing impairment that is sustained prior to the acquisition of language, which can occur as a result of a congenital condition or through hearing loss in early infancy. Prelingual deafness impairs an individual’s ability to acquire a spoken language, but children born into signing families rarely have delays in language development.
Post-lingual Deafness:
Post-lingual deafness is hearing impairment that is sustained after the acquisition of language, which can occur as a result of disease, trauma, or as a side-effect of a medicine. Typically, hearing loss is gradual and often detected by family and friends of affected individuals long before the patients themselves will acknowledge the disability. Common treatments include hearing aids and learning lip reading.
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Cause of hearing loss: Age:
Presbycusis, the progressive loss of ability to hear high frequencies with increasing age, begins in early adulthood, but does not usually interfere with ability to understand conversation until much later. Long term exposure to environmental noise: Noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) typically is centered at 3000, 4000, or 6000 Hz. As noise damage progresses, damage starts affecting lower and higher frequencies.
Genetic:
Hearing loss can be inherited. Both dominant genes and recessive genes exist which can cause mild to profound impairment. If a family has a dominant gene for deafness it will persist across generations because it will manifest itself in the offspring even if it is inherited from only one parent. If a family had genetic hearing impairment caused by a recessive gene it will not always be apparent as it will have to be passed onto offspring from both parents. There are several diseases and illnesses that result in deafness. Also, sometimes, medications result in irreversible damage to the ear. Sometimes even due to sustained physical trauma or injuries, people lose their ability to hear.
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School for Deaf-mute society, Ahmedabad The school for the deaf mutes society, established in 1908, The School for the Deaf mute Society is one of the oldest organizations in the field of education and rehabilitation of the hearing and the visually impaired. Most children coming here are deaf from a Pre-lingual stage. Hence,forging deep bonds of friendships from their childhood itself, most children love coming to school although there is no typical language to share. Besides studying, they are extremely passionate about dancing. The children love swaying and moving to any given beat. There are students who also come from local homes to study passionately following their dreams to become notable professionals in their lives. Extremely fun-loving and interactive students, there is a stark difference in the way the school runs for the deaf and blind. From the difference in decibels to the way they behave in their recess hours. Although several children are hostellers, they do not mix or mingle amongst each other. Transcending those barriers is still far.
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Most children as they are in their kindergarten classes, they are taught to lip read as much as possible. The teacher goes all out to make sure the child can read lips as much as he/ she can, in case the child is anything but profound deaf. Most often the children begin to read lips of the speakers. As little as they may be, they would pay close attention to the speaker’s facial expressions and mouth. The children gain enough clarity to even be able to follow instructions by the teacheras she speaks. However, as observed, when the student gets into higher classes he would slowly get into the academics ways of the curriculum, and begin to lose the once adapted ability to lip read. The sign language is what they would heavily rely upon as that is what most children have around them- all their friends like to converse in sign language. They are extremely expressive in their ways of talking this way as well and best of all, they are understood by the ones who are with them all the time. The older students would not make the effort of reading lips at all when talking to a stranger. They would ask you to write and converse and best would be if you could converse with them in their sign language. Some completely disinterested if you can’t talk in their sign language.
Case study1: Age group: 12-13 years Special educator: Mamta Ben A class of 15 students, MamtaBen teaches them all subjects, required by them as a mandate to sit for the state board exam. What is unique in the method of teaching and learning is that, everything taught needs immense repetition as well as patience. Mamta Ben notes that they might be thoroughly attentive and writing every word down neatly( they have brilliant neat handwriting) however still, if asked anything about what they had written in another couple of hours, they would not be able to recollect much from it. Because the source of information only enters through one sense, there is not much of an experience to recall. Hence making it difficult to remember anything subjective from text. Unlike you or me who while writing, besides the visual feedback, also have the auditory feedback to recollect from our memory bank. The students are extremely creative and wonderful when it comes to drawing skills. Their ability to understand and portray visuals is far greater than the ability to memorize text. It is also more enjoyable for them when someone tries to communicate with them through drawings. Upon being asked about instances from their lives about certain events, they have also had experiences of how they saved their neighbour’s child life, when he was home alone and the gas had been leaking.
Its not an “eye opener”, rather an “eye contact” Day one at the Deaf and Mute School was an interesting experience. I had never been inside any deaf and dumb class that young. The children who come to learn are probably only 4-5 years on age and they write on their one square foot slate board, as confidently as if they have been writing since forever. It is a speech therapy class where these children are encouraged and taught how to speak. Children that age are not necessarily dumb, and shouldn’t even directly assumed to be. They still can speak, the difference being that it is hard for them to imitate the sound produced. Most children cannot speak because they have not heard words and sounds to imitate around them, so that even that adds to memory. For a normal child, a lot of learning happens by external input of teachers in classrooms and parents. However, a majority of learning happens by themselves as they pick up words from their environment too. Siblings talking, Parents interacting, friends speaking, repetition of words all the time, leads to a lot of intuitive learning. While producing these sounds, the children find it difficult in distinguishing the tone of the voice. For instance, the going and up and down, the gamut of tones expressed in a conversation,that give significance to words. While lipreading they really watch the xpression ont he speaker’s face. Often the look is the soul of what a person says. From a very natal age, the children begin in develop their sense of expression. The need to express is so strong that they the would repeat themselves emphatically to really get their points across. As a result of using their hands throughout their lives, they have definitely explored their hands and the innumerable possibilities of indicating with their hands. However normal might they seem while they pursue their daily, routine chores of the day, the give away comes when they fail to communicate. Failing to communicate is again only subjective of the times when someone whom they wish to communicate with is not looking at them. Hence, yes! “An eye contact is important for communication.” Reminds me of my dad giving me some last minute tips on how to capture an audience. Excerpts from :The NIghtjar Awakes: Blog entries maintained during the duration of the course
Case study2 : Shraddha Fadke Age: 36 yrs Translator: Daksha Ben
She has profound deafness and has been so since her childhood. She lives with her family and her child is also deaf. Her husband who has also Initiated the Deaf Developer’s Association, in Ahmedbad, provides independence and employment to deaf people who approach them for work. She says that she has a very normal life because her entirre family is deaf. Shraddhaji teaches in the children Computer aided skills. Her communication with her students is very smooth, where she knows exactly how to get their attention and talk. She says that her communication with anyone besides the deaf community is highly dependent over the cellphone text messaging. When asked about being woken up by alarm clocks, she remembered how her mother-inlaw would never like to wake her up personally so, she would switch her bedlamp on and off repeatedly to catch her attention. She also mentioned how she wouls always keep her baby next to her when she was small, incase the baby ever cried , or she needed to pay any special attention to it.
Products existing
Alarm clocks with wireless bed shakers
Hearing aid
Baby cry signaler
Carbon monoxide detector/signaler
Strobe light phone ring alert
Door access transmitter
Hearing aid dryer
Approach taken:
In order to understand their visual sensibilities better, I did a 1 afternoon exercise of showing them a picture book and asking them to re draw it explaining someone else the story.
Approach taken: Following up on the drawing skills of the students in general. There was a pattern noticed, where the children, althohugh taught the same theme, would find their individuality in representing it.
Conversing together Initially there had been a barrier in conversation, when I thought probably one needs to know sign language to talk to deaf people. The barrier was however only in the mind. The conversations overflowed as soon as they saw me draw. Drawing small doodles of what I wanted to say would make it comprehensive for what I wanted to say as most of the students were Gujarati speaking as well. Mrs Shraddha and her students were very interactive when it came to my discussion with them.
Areas of concern: COMMUNICATION AND PERCEPTIONS: >>Emphatic signs: There is a need to put in a different amount and kind of effort to converse or to do any work.
They have explore their hands and gestures made using them in uncountable ways. They have a Sign system that they follow to understand anyone who knows hand signaling. They also have a unique way of signaling amongst each other, which is must faster and comprehensive for themselves. The need for both hands for using sign language: As observed, mostly, those who are deaf, focus on performing one task, the task at hand properly, to their best. Since, daily chores all occupy ones hands, multi-tasking tendencies are reduced
>>Learning by repetition: Teachers resort to teaching the same content over and over again, in different
methods for them to register it and not forget it. For an exam, they said, that even if they write something out of this memory, is a victory for them. Memorizing plain text or subjective written content is difficult, and is simply encouraging their photographic power of memory. Hence they are taught either with respect to associations, or a more experience based learning. The best experience would be the best to remember. Teaching aids include visuals and an immense amount of interaction.
>>Pre-lingual loss of hearing: Those children who do not receive proper speech therapy at a younger age,
land up facing issues of classroom learning while pursuing higher studies. The teachers in higher classes tend to be more academic centered than the ones in junior classes, where the overall growth of the student is a primary concern.
>>Understanding complete sentences: Since their childhood, they are taught that everything has a name. So their learning is highly centered upon what the subject of the discussion is about. The next step to understand what the subject is doing in the discussion is very difficult to understand because of the lack of proper knowledge about grammar. Hence most times, the teacher has to take a very objective approach to teaching stories from textbooks. Many a times the overall understanding of the story or sentence is lost in the process of making them understand the subjects of the discussion.
>> ‘Voicing’ problems: As children, the students still find one way or the other to express their problems,
grudges and issues to their friends or elders. However, as someone who is much older, people do feel ‘socially impaired’. The difficulty in perceiving the tone of the voice, gives rise to misunderstandings. As old people who are deaf, they find it extremely painful to sit in a park with other old people who sit and talk. Most often they find themselves excluded in a conversation or many a times ignored, as they feel it is too much of a burden for one person to continuously keep translating the conversation. So they miss being part of a conversation or being able to comprehend what is relevant to them. Thus, many feel that ‘It is easier to understand someone who talks.’
>>Understanding sign language: An ideal conversation between a deaf and a normal person, happens in stages: 1. Either one or the other, calls to grab the attention. 2. Asks question, or starts conversation: Using sign language. Incase the conversation is not understood then, Using associative sign language that the normal can understand. If not understood still, then, Writing in a common language or drawing
NAVIGATIONAL AND ALERTING SIGNALS: CONTEXTUAL PERCEPTIONS: >>Sensing danger: Because of certain past experiences in their lives, such as a dog bite, or a road accident or
even a narrow escape, they try and live an alert lifestyle. In the case of children who are deaf, parents prefer to inculcate precautious habits in their children. Does sensing danger become difficult if it is hard to make them imagine it ? In order to imagine, one needs an experience (personal or shared). The power of visual communication is tested here, because children already face problems in understanding those who can hear. Most times, they would watch expressions of people around them to get an understanding of the situation without having to ask. How can prevention be made more comprehensive or easier for them to understand and relate to?
>>Line of Sight: An eye contact is essential for any conversation to take place. Many a times, they would shout
out sounds so that those who can hear, turn to watch and see the person emphatically signaling to call the person he wants to call. Other times, if they are sitting on a table, one would just bang the table in order to grab attention. Teachers would switch off the lights and fans in a room in case the class doesn’t notice her presence. Cell phones are greatly exploited by the users in the form of text messaging. Cell phones kept on vibration, catches their attention. Besides the aspect of grabbing the attention, the other aspect is that of locating the current speaker in a conversation.
>>Lip reading or speech reading: Lip reading is only possible if there is appropriate distance between the
conversationists. The kind of light falling on the face of the speaker is also critical to note. While in lectures, the special educators take care of doing one task at a time. While writing they would all write and when she speaks, they would all be looking at her speak.
>>Sound identification: From a very young age children are taught associations. The ones who are overcom-
ing profound deafness, are usually not taught what objects create what kind of sounds. However, most of them are taught by ways to checking their vocal chords vibrating in their throats, as to what kind of sound is getting produced by the attempt that they make.
Product ideas
A Sound sensor Keyword sensitive: In a conversation, can When the sender is calling the receiver, locate the speaker and indicates the current but the receiver is facing the other side, and walking away unknowingly, this com- sentence, to catch up. pass shows the direction of the caller and the distance of the caller. * Maybe receiver gets a notification on his mobile
Making an audio library and using it to express yourself. Using audio-text converter. Catching phrases from subtitles of movies.
Indigenous ipad: to draw and converse rapidly.
Product ideas
A Navigational device to give greater understanding of the scenario, with respect to sounds.
Door Bell alarm augmenting the smell stimuli
Assistive device to increase the sensibility to lip read
There are holographic cards with phonemes printed on it. Upon inserting it and rotating it to see, the user will see the minute changes in the spoken word.
A device where whatever the speaker speaks is felt back as air.
A device, which when held close to the face and spoken into, glows as per the pressure of the spoken word. The bottom hemisphere would glow yellow upon a high exahalation word like :SHOUT.
Seeing the ripples and bubbles in the water, the child will be sensitised to the modulation within every word. The light underbeath the tumbler chages the ambience of the tumbler. The child may like to play around on his own. Chiild can understand difference in sentences like: “Whats that pig outdoors?” and “Whats that big noise?”
Lip reading Lip reading, also known as speechreading, is a technique of understanding speech by visually interpreting the movements of the lips, face and tongue with information provided by the context, language, and any residual hearing. People with normal vision, hearing and social skills sub-consciously use information from the lips and face to aid aural comprehension in everyday conversation.
Sounds:
Each speech sound (phoneme) has a particular facial and mouth position (viseme), although many phonemes share the same viseme and thus are impossible to distinguish from visual information alone. Lip reading is an impressive skill to possess because how much of the articulation of normal speech is not visible to an observer who cannot “read the mind� can be fairly difficult. When a normal person speaks, the tongue moves in at least 3 places (tip, middle and back), and the soft palate rises and falls. All of these articulatory gestures are phonetically significant, changing the speech sound produced in important ways, but are invisible to the lip reader. Consequently, sounds whose place of articulation is deep inside the mouth or throat are not detectable. Certain pairs look identical, such as [p] and [b], [k] and [g], [t] and [d], [f] and [v], and [s] and [z]; likewise for nasal sounds. It has been estimated that only 30% to 40% of sounds in the English language are distinguishable from sight alone.
Lipreading issues:
Thus a lipreader must use cues from the environment and a knowledge of what is likely to be said. It is much easier to speechread customary phrases such as greetings than utterances that appear in isolation and without supporting information, such as the name of a person never met before. Lipreaders who have grown up deaf may never have heard the spoken language and are unlikely to be fluent users of it, which makes lipreading much more difficult. They must also learn the individual visemes by conscious training in an educational setting. In addition, lipreading also takes a lot of focus, and can be extremely tiring. For these and other reasons, many deaf people prefer to use other means of communication with non-signers, such as mime and gesture, writing, and sign language interpreters. When conversing with a lipreader, exaggerated mouthing of words is not considered to be helpful and may in fact obscure useful clues. However, it is possible to learn to emphasize useful clues; this is known as lip speaking.
“Here is a class of a dozen boys, who, being called up to give their names were photographed by the instantaneous process just as each one was commencing to pronounce his own name. The twelve names were Oom, Alden, Eastman, Alfred, Arthur, Luke, Fletcher, Matthew, Theodore, Richard, Shirmer, and Hisswald. Now it would not seem possible to be able to give the correct name to each of the twelve boys, but if you practice the list over to each one, you will find it not a difficult task to locate the proper name for every one of the boys.�
The phoneme chart The phonemic chart contains all 44 sounds that make up words in spoken English. It’s very useful for studying English pronunciation, as it’s the one used by most dictionaries. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a standardized representation of the sounds of spoken language.The IPA is used by foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech pathologists and therapists, singers, actors, lexicographers, constructed language creators (conlangers), and translators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are distinctive in spoken language, largely, phonemes.
Description:
The general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound.This means that it does not use combinations of letters to represent single sounds, the way English does with <sh> and <ng>, or single letters to represent multiple sounds the way <x> represents /ks/ or /z/ in English. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as <c> does in English and other European languages
Animation lip-synching Lip synching is the art of making an animated character appear to speak in a prerecorded track of dialogue. On one hand where lip synching is done to fill in the lip movements for the speaker in the process of animating over a pre-recorded track, many animators opt for the method of using the “ideal” lip sync, rather than the “most accurate” lip sync. The difference being only notified to those who understand the speech by looking at the lip movements alone and not listening to the sound. It is observed that most deaf people prefer to watch movies with subtitles, however, most times if the viewer can read lips well, they do not really take the help of the sub titles at all. This effect of viewership is called the Mc Gurk Effect. Only in the case of long-range shots and dialogues addressed facing the back to the viewer, or any time when the viewer may find it difficult to watch the lips of the speaker, do they really need subtitles.
The mirror The mirror is often used by speech therapists and special educators to teach the child the exact lip movement. The mirror helps the child to note how the face muscles, jaws, teeth and tongue need to move as one utter sounds from the mouth. The teacher and the child sit next to each other watching the mirror and teacher would slowly teach sounds. Viewership and imitation are the two ways by which the process of sound utterance is taught to the child, besides the additional input of the teacher.
http://rongbuk.tumblr.com/post/14920782292/the-mirror-a-process-diagram-to-understand I tried to understand the mirror-teaching, and as I read the phoneme chart in order to understand my own lip movements, I realised the importance of the position of the tongue and the facial cues required while speaking for the first time in my life!
Case Study: 3 Name: Natasha Taraporevala Age: 20 years She is a Graphic Design student at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. She has fit into the community very well since her first day at NID. The reason she tells is her ability to converse with everyone. Sometimes even faculties wonder about how she can cope with the class lectures so well. Her viewpoint is that the Indian society has not matured so much to accept those who cannot speak their language. They embrace the ones who can involve themselves with the community affairs and therein lies the role of being able to communicate. She credits her ability to her teacher Mrs Dhun Adenwalla, who had been very open minded and patient in her approach to teach. Mrs Adenwalla made sure that the child was always taught using positive re-inforcements, which would encourage the child to speak. “She would never get angry”, Natasha says. She would also maintain a relationship with the child’s siblings, who would be the main interaction with her student at home. She motivated the siblings to talk as much to each other so that the difference is never really felt and the child picks up lip reading faster. Natasha lip reads very fluently and also mentioned that the movie “SHREK” has the best lip movements that has beeen made for an animated film. She mentioned that it is not always that subtitles would be required to watch a film. Infact she has enhanced her speech and reading by watching more and more films!
Flashcards
Visual communication is one of the only way that best connects to the child. A flashcard set that the child can best relate to can used as an aid to teach lip movements. Flashcards are an interesting way to communicate just the necessary amount of information to the child. It also serves as a good visual feedback to come back to or refer to again and again for the communicator.
Flashcard in relation to the mirror:
th
3
aa
2
t-uh d-uh
4 u
4
au oy
2
ee dee gee
j-uh
see tee
9gi
Flashcard in relation to the mirror:
5
vv
2
Sheesha : The mirror game
Game instruction manual Game Name: Sheesha (The Mirror Game) Age Range: 10 yrs and above Number of Players: 3 or more Back story This game is an outcome of a design project called ‘Design for Special Needs’, during which there was a rich interaction with children with hearing impairment. The idea has been to maintain the link between the experience and then to make it more universal, by ways of which communities become more inclusive. Mirror is a very important article in the daily life that helps a child /person understand the visual clues of speech. It has been estimated that only 30% - 40% of sounds in the English language are distinguishable from sight alone. Hence,people sub-consciously use information from the lips and face to aid aural comprehension in everyday conversation. Can we lip-read in the absence of sound? How can we understand each other better? What are the visual cues while talking? Game Object There are certain pairs of words that look similar, while there are some that are undetectable However, do not get confused as they may “look” like another sound, but are in reality a different sound all together. The key is to master these differences and score beyond measure! So you must challenge to make words but, by trying to remember only what it will look like to the viewer, while speaking it out. The larger the word, higher will be the score. Game Contents A deck of cards A pair of die 2 instruction sound card 4 score boards
Game Assembly Before starting the game, 5 blue and 5 red cards are distributed to each player. The rest of the cards are decked up and kept in the centre. There needs to be a word-giver, a word-maker and one sheesha(mirror) who will guess the word. Game Setup If you are playing in three’s: Player one must propose a word to the word maker. As the word-maker arranges the word, player three, who is the sheesha(mirror), must be able to guess it for the word maker and the sheesha to proceed with scores. If you are playing in teams : One team must be the proposer , and a word-maker from the opposite team must make the right sequence in order to make his own team’s sheesha(mirror), guess the exact word and the team to proceed with scores. Game Play The game starts with whoever throws the lowest score on the dice. The turn order is alternate playing: eg- I play after you. Terms: Seed: The player who proposes the word Wordsmith: The player who makes the word Sheesha : The player who guesses the word. Turn Sequence The turn sequence goes clockwise and at the end of the round, the scores are updated. Special Cards There are two guide cards in the box that will help you understand the sound in context to a word in case you are at crossroads. Hints There are hints on the rear of each card. However, taking the help of hints comes at the cost of half the score! Winning/Scoring The winner is the one with the highest score. Tips: Try making words using similar “looking” sounds. Sounds that look similar have higher points!