Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology of the Organs of Hearing, Vision, and Speech - Shvetsov A. G. 2006

Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology of Speech
The Role of Hearing in Speech Development

Human speech emerged and developed on The basis of the auditory system: The Development of The ability to produce sounds is linked to the Development of the ability to perceive them. Humans could not have achieved such a high level of vocal apparatus control if the auditory Organs had not developed in parallel. Hearing is so vital for speech that its absence, such as in deafness or hearing impairment, renders a person mute. Deaf-mutism, in turn, leads to cognitive delay, various communication difficulties, and personality changes. Even in ancient Greece, the deaf and hard of hearing were barred from holding leadership positions.

Auditory perception plays a crucial role in the development of cognitive activity, enriching human imagination and mental representations of the surrounding world. However, hearing also has a more specific "speech" purpose: it enables a child to expand their vocabulary, develop oral speech, and make necessary phonemic adjustments to it. Therefore, even a slight hearing impairment can lead to pronunciation defects and disruption of the grammatical Structure of speech.

The Auditory Analyzer begins to function from the very first hours of a child's life. The first reaction to sound is manifested by pupil dilation, breath-holding, and certain movements. Then, the child begins to listen to the voices of adults and respond to them; In the second half of the first year of life, they begin to perceive specific sound combinations and associate them with certain objects or actions; at the age of 7–9 months, they begin to imitate the speech sounds of those around them. By one year of age, their first words appear.

In children deaf from birth, imitation of the speech of others does not develop. Babbling appears in them just as it does in children with normal hearing. However, it receives no reinforcement from auditory perception and therefore gradually fades away. In such cases, without special pedagogical intervention, children's speech does not develop. Gradually, The activity of the auditory and speech-motor analyzers becomes more complex. In The process of phylogenesis, human hearing acquired a special property: the ability to accurately distinguish the sounds of human speech (phonemes). This distinguishes it from the hearing of animals. The phonemic sound system, used in various types of speech activity to distinguish word meanings, is formed in a child between 2 and 5 years of age under the control of hearing. The development of phonemic perception occurs gradually, in parallel with The formation of pronunciation. Usually, by the age of 4, a child masters the ability to aurally distinguish all the phonemes of their native language.

However, in early childhood, a child perceives the sounds, syllables, and words of others unclearly and in a distorted manner. Therefore, children often confuse one phoneme with another and have difficulty understanding speech. Very often, children do not notice their own incorrect pronunciation, so it becomes habitual and persistent, and is subsequently overcome with great difficulty. A child's speech is formed correctly only when the development of the second signaling and phonemic systems is constantly monitored by an adult.

Hearing impairment that occurs before the onset of speech development, or at its very beginning, typically leads to general speech underdevelopment, characterized by impaired sound pronunciation (for example: umyvatsya — muvanti) and the confusion of sounds based on voicing-devoicing or palatalization-nonpalatalization (for example: babochka — papochka).

Other speech development disorders in deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals include:

§ repeated incorrect pronunciation of words, despite pronouncing them correctly on one occasion;

§ Impairment of the lexico-grammatical structure of speech: individual PARTS OF THE sentence are omitted, morphological norms are violated, and errors are made in The Use of various word parts;

§ a limited vocabulary, which leads to difficulties in reading comprehension because children often do not understand the meaning of individual words;

§ difficulty in mastering the use of adverbs, conjunctions, and especially compound and complex sentences expressing purpose, cause-and-effect, and other logical relationships. This proves difficult for children and adolescents not so much due to The complexity of lexico-grammatical relationships, but rather due to an insufficient understanding of the sentence content and the underdevelopment of their verbal-logical conceptual thinking, as concrete-conceptual thinking prevails. In children with hearing impairments, There is a reduced ability to receive, process, store, and use information:

§ difficulty in verbal mediation;

§ a slower rate of concept formation.

Speech development delay in children with hearing impairments affects not so much the size of their vocabulary, but rather the unique way they use and understand word meanings. The worse a child hears, the worse they speak; the earlier the hearing impairment occurred, the more severe the speech disorder; the earlier measures are taken to preserve or develop normal speech, the better the child's speech is preserved.