DEAFNESS.
[To TER EDITOR OP THE " EPROTATOR."1
Stn,—Most persons have had some experience of the difficulty of carrying on conversation with those who are more or less "hard of hearing,"—i.e.,partially deaf. But there is one particular fact in talking with the deaf to which I wish to invite attention. It is common and very noticeable that the deaf hear from the voice something very different from the spoken words, and that they often have great difficulty in catching correctly a single initial or other consonantal sound in a word. To make my meaning clear, I will give one illustration. The other day a young boy said to his grandmother, in a clear, silvery voice, with which she was familiar, "Grandma, I have got some radish-seeds." She replied instantly, showing that she heard readily, " Rabbit-skins ! What shall you do with them?" A thousand similar illustrations can be adduced, sometimes very amusing, but always more or less painful to the considerate. Now the question is,—how does the message of the air get per- verted ? Where, at what stage in its journey to the brain, does the sentence or word get distorted ? Its first impact upon the tympanum must le true; then, how is it that the brain receives
from the impact an impression which is not the original and -correct one, but an erroneous and quite different impression ? This is not a case of not hearing, or imperfect hearing, but of inaccurate hearing,—of the actual substitution of words, as if a telegraph clerk had sent along the wire one message, and a quite different one was received at the other end, there being no inter- mediate stations to account for the anomaly.
One form of this peculiarity is specially observable with some letters of words : as "t," for example, will become "a" or or some other letter which will give a word of similar sound, like " see " or " key " for "tea." In all these instances the hearing appears to be deflected, as it were ; as if the aural nerves took up some other message on the way from the ear to the brain.
Another peculiarity is where there seems to be suspended action of the nerves of hearing, as when a conversation in which the deaf person takes an ordinary part glides off into another subject, the deaf hearer does not follow, but presently makes a remark in continuation of the original subject, as though the nerves had been stimulated again by a sound which fitted to their last vibration from the original conversation.
Perhaps some reader of the Spectator who has made deafness a scientific study can help the writer to an explanation of the phenomena he has noticed.—I am, Sir, &c., OBSERVER.
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