Speech Disorders

A Psychological Study of the Various Defects of Speech

Sara M. Stinchfield, Stinchfield, Sara M

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136310256
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume XX in a series of twenty-one on Cognitive Psychology. Originally published in 1933, this is a psychological study of the various defects of speech and the suggestion that additional facilities are needed for dealing with the speech-handicapped child or adolescent, because of the bearing of speech disorders upon personality, socialization and economic success.

Part I

THE NATURE OF SPEECH DISORDERS

CHAPTER I

SPEECH OF INFANCY AND EARLY CHILDHOOD

(a) NORMAL SPEECH DEVELOPMENT

(b) ABNORMAL SPEECH DEVELOPMENT

What Happens when Speech “goes Wrong”?

STUDENTS of child psychology, parents, teachers and clinicians, are increasingly interested to know what is happening when a child fails to develop speech at the usual time. Workers with speech-handicapped children recognize the fact that a child is often doubly unfortunate, not only because he possesses a speech peculiarity which sets him somewhat apart from the group, but also because the possession of such a difficulty tends to breed a much more serious concomitant—that of a warped, unsocial or peculiar personality.

We learn from child psychology that long before the child is ready to enter school, his personality is already more or less “set”, determined in certain attitudes or trends, and biased for better or for worse, according to the child’s outlook on life and his social environment. If his childhood is the product of what we call a “balanced” home environment, society will be the richer, and may take especial pains to furnish the child with such tools as are needed for fostering his particular abilities.

The problem of the education of the specially-handicapped child is much more difficult however. Here we may find not only a double but even a triple handicap. The child may not only be deaf, but may possess some other handicap besides his speech impediment. He may have other physical or mental defects in addition to deafness. Matters are then more complicated, because we not only have to deal with the child’s deafness, blindness, or crippled condition, but we must also bear in mind that he has a speech handicap which distinctly limits his possibilities of attainment. Moreover, along with his special handicap may go personal idiosyncrasies, such as tics, facial grimaces, various mannerisms and little defects of personality which are closely bound up with his physical or mental handicap as well as with his speech difficulty.

In order to consider more carefully the nature and causes of some of the speech disturbances which accompany various special defects such as deafness, blindness, crippled condition, mental deficiency and sub-normality, let us go back to the beginnings of speech in infancy. By recalling some of the facts which have been observed by students of primitive language, and of the origins of speech in babyhood, we may find significant facts which bear upon the problem of how normal speech begins. We may also discover some of the things which happen when normal speech fails to appear.

Animal Language and Human Speech

Language is defined as a mode of behaviour. A vocal language is found in animals, but this is not identical with the articulate speech of man. The animal gives expression to emotional cries, primitive sounds connected with the immediate moment and with local conditions. Long and patient training of animals such as the chimpanzee and other anthropoids fails to reveal any special aptitude for performing the delicate sequence of muscle, tongue, lip, jaw, soft-palate and vocal-cord activity necessary to produce the articulate speech sounds which begin to appear very early in the human infant. The animal possesses the necessary structures, but lacks the finer control of minute accessory muscles controlling the speech apparatus. His brain does not function on so complex a level as does the human brain. From the fourth month onward the baby may be expected to make random, spontaneous speech sounds which are very like the vowels and consonants found in articulate speech. He does this with no conception of their meaning, and cannot even reproduce them volitionally, but he is using some of the finer co-ordinations of the speech organs in his spontaneous babbling, while the animal infant shows no such tendency.

Not only do animals use the language of emotion, but they use some gesture or pantomime which corresponds roughly to what we find in primitive human society. If the animal’s vocabulary of expression is chiefly limited to emotional cries such as groans, grunts, screams, calls, laughing, clucking, and croons of contentment, we know that normally the human infant very early develops all these, and soon shows the ability to emit an additional series of sounds by means of the movements of special accessory muscles involved in articulate speech. Due to auditory stimuli primarily, and with visual aid or observation, the normal child shows himself to be adept at imitative movements with these organs long before he has begun to associate them with definite meanings.¹ And so we find that the human infant shows a special aptitude for making these sounds in a non-purposive way, whereas the various domestic or wild animals under observation have shown fewer such tendencies. According to Negus² the use of intelligence is an essential for any elaboration of the vocal cord, but acquisition of the powers of vocal communication have given a great spur to the development of higher intelligence, as in man.

The Difference a Qualitative One

Microscopic examination of the brain structure of the anthropoids as compared with man has not revealed any marked differences, but that there is a qualitative difference is evident from the speed with which the human infant with a normal brain develops finer accessory movements. Animals in the same environment, stimulated by the same auditory stimuli, show no such tendencies, and do not even respond to intensive training, except in rare instances, and after a long and tedious process, during which they fail to achieve what the human infant accomplishes in a very short time. Man’s greater dexterity in manual movements, in co-ordinations of eye-hand-tongue motions and frequency of practice has led to higher cerebral development and to the attainment of higher skills than the animal possesses.

The dominance-by-brain gives man the advantage over animals of greater size and strength, and accounts for gradations of mental development within the human race, so that we often find dominance of one man or race by another.

The possession of speech skill sets man apart from all other creatures, and renders him the most interesting, the most powerful, the most creative of all, as well as perhaps the most unpredictable and baffling. The way in which man uses this power to dominate, to subjugate, to control, to defend or to barter, and the degree of correspondence between his words and his actions, may make or mar not only interrelations between individuals, but international relations as well, and therefore the psychology of language becomes not merely an interesting object of study and research, but may have a great deal to do with altering geographical and national barriers, or raising barriers where none have formerly existed. It is even contended by international experts that the absence of a common language is the chief obstacle to the progress of international understanding, and therefore the chief underlying cause of war.¹

Primitive tribes regarded speech symbols of more civilized tribes as a sort of magic, a form of communication mixed with sorcery and black art. A stranger who could not speak the language of a savage tribe was usually regarded as a natural enemy.²

Speech is the most serviceable way of making ourselves understood, of conveying our wishes accurately, or recording for future use those ideas and ideals which we wish to preserve, through the use of written signs or symbols. If the mental processes which govern language are imperfect, then our thought processes are disorganized and our reasoning power is greatly diminished. If for any reason the language which we use is chaotic, then our social life is at once crippled, while the communication of thought and even of clear thinking, becomes unnecessarily difficult.¹

Linguistic Ability of Infants as Compared with Adults

Those who have watched the speech development of the normal infant envy him his linguistic ability, because he acquires a vocabulary which is quite adequate to his needs and to his environment, within a remarkably short space of time. As adults some of us have struggled for years to attain even a mediocre vocabulary in a foreign tongue, and yet we are rarely able to obscure some traces of foreign accent in the new language. The child is bothered by no such difficulty. He babbles and produces random speech sounds similar to those in the language which he hears about him, and reproduces them with surprising accuracy even before he has learned to attach meanings to them. It is said that Belgian refugee children, following the World War, were very soon able to speak the language of their new homes as well as the children who had always spoken it.

Even when various teachers of foreign languages attempt to instruct by the “natural method”, we find that it seems to be impossible to give the essentials to a mixed group of adults within a very brief period, because the situation is artificial, and cannot take the place of the actual situation which surrounds the child who is learning to speak a new language.

Habit Formation in Speech

If adults are found to be slower than children in acquiring new and perfectly normal speech habits, it is also true that if unfortunate speech habits have been acquired during the speech-learning process, and if they have persisted into adulthood, they will be much harder to displace and to replace with the correct speech habits, than would have been the case in childhood.

Even though a child may show a natural gift for language above that of other children of the same family or neighbourhood, we have no way of making certain that he will learn to make all the speech sounds correctly, or even intelligibly. The chances are that he will give as good sounds as he hears about him, but individual peculiarities, organic or psychic conditions which are unfavourable to normal development, may cause a handicap to occur at any one of a number of stages of growth in speech, as in physical development. As adults we are inclined to take too much for granted in regard to the development of this highly-complex function called “learning to talk”. We forget many of its drawbacks, and some of its possible setbacks.

Social Significance of Speech

The social value of speech is so apparent to the “normal” child in a “normal” environment, that he soon learns to make little gestures or signs, even before he can use articulate speech. The sign of negation, for instance, which may at first merely have been a head-movement, to refuse undesired food, soon means “no”, and definite refusal is implied by the turning away of the head. From the earliest months we find that the hand and mouth are closely allied, and along with other motor movements we find the child using considerable tongue activity, as though this were an aid to the acquisition of manual dexterity and motor controls, as in learning to walk.

When the writer’s small niece was learning to walk, she worked so hard to secure balance, that her little body stiffened and straightened into all sorts of chaotic and inco-ordinate movements of trunk, head, and legs before she w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• PREFACE
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PART I THE NATURE OF SPEECH DISORDERS
• PART II STATISTICAL STUDIES OF THE SPEECH OF 3000 COLLEGE WOMEN AND OF PUBLIC SCHOOL GROUPS
• SUPPLEMENT. SPEECH DIAGNOSTIC TESTS
• INDEX