Orthophony

Improving communication in deficients

This year twenty-five people who have been unable to talk since birth will take part in research aimed at making their communication with the outside world easier. The two researchers responsible for this work, Natacha Trudeau and Ann Sutton, are convinced that they can provide persons who are nearly mute with better tools.

Some 200,000 Canadians suffer from speech deficiency, which is sometimes acquired, but most often present from birth. While not completely mute—since they can produce sounds and even pronounce a few words—they obviously cannot use speech to make themselves understood in everyday life. However, their hearing is intact. Frequently, their crippling inability to communicate is accompanied by a serious motor disorder.

In earlier research, Ms Sutton was able to show that persons with this deficiency apparently did not have the same syntactic flexibility as people with full speech. She designed a test in which participants used ideograms to reproduce simple sentences that nevertheless required the speakers to adopt a strategy to make themselves understood. The sentence was the following: “The girl pushing the clown is wearing a hat.” Small Playmobil characters and accessories were reproduced (on computer or on cardboard), including a girl, a baby carriage, a hat, and a clown. People with speech (25 in all) changed the order of the phrase to “Girl hat carriage clown,” which gave “The girl wearing a hat pushes the clown.” They therefore used the strategy of word proximity. The others did not invert the initial order of words, and left the hat at the end of the sentence, which requires the word “girl” to be repeated. This gave “The girl pushes the clown. The girl wears a hat.”

Some participants had serious motor difficulties and took up to 45 seconds to produce a single image. Some of them were unable to use their arms or legs, or did not have use of either. But the principle of least effort hardly means that it is impossible to improve training of the participants. Perhaps we have forgotten to teach them certain skills. But which skills?

When thinking about the importance of the representation of language in the ability to communicate other than by words, Natacha Trudeau and Ann Sutton have not excluded the hypothesis that persons who are unable to speak do not receive adequate education, in particular due to preconceived ideas or prejudices about their ability to learn. “When we have difficulty understanding a child, we over- or under-estimate his skills. But the more correct our vision, the better things will go,” Ann Sutton remarks. “And if this child can learn to read and write, this will open doors for him.”