Deafness
The impact of deafness on the child development vary with the depth of deafness, age of its onset, early detection and diagnosis, his family, his entourage and opportunities child's intellectual.
Effects language:
Little by little, growing up, the hearing child acquires speech by imitation.
The deaf child, himself, understands the situation and come to be understood by simple gestures, facial expressions on which he will eventually put words (signifiers learning-served).
However, the grammar and sentence structure will consist of language for deaf children in learning and it takes much more time than the hearing child to make sentences.
Linguistic implications of deafness vary depending on multiple intrinsic and extrinsic factors.
Intrinsic factors of deafness:
- Age at onset of deafness
More deafness settled early, the repercussions are more important language development of deaf children who did not have time or just to soak up the "model" speech delivered by his entourage, yet for knows that this time of impregnation, the precursor of imitation, is the determining factor in access to spoken language of hearing child.
- The type of deafness
Conductive Hearing Loss (whose maximum degree of hearing loss is 60 dB), are generally less debilitating in terms of language development that sensorineural hearing loss (including loss can reach 120 dB).
- The degree of deafness
More hearing loss, the greater the quantity and quality of sound environmental information which reach the deaf child are restricted, hindering the child's access to oral language.
Obviously, the impact on language development will be different depending on the degree of hearing loss:
• In case of mild hearing loss:
the child perceives correctly the voice to normal intensity, but not the feeble voice (eg the voice of someone who has his back) Some phonetic elements begin to escape it anyway, and it may confuse similar words are Distinguished by a phoneme different: for example, the words "cake" and "gift".
• In case of moderate hearing loss:
Group I: the difficulties of the child are the same as those described for mild hearing loss, but they are amplified.
Group II: the word is no longer perceived as loud and the final syllables are outside the hearing impaired child. It is particularly embarrassed in a noisy environment or when several parties are talking at once, or even on the phone, when lip-reading is not possible.
An apparatus and a speech-language support prove necessary for him to acquire a certain level of language and be educated.
• In cases of severe hearing loss:
Even the loud voice is not easily perceived; lip reading, the apparatus and speech therapy are essential for social and academic integration.
• In cases of profound deafness:
The child does not perceive the word, it can not qualify as very low auditory thin remnants of its hearing. In the absence of speech therapy, fitting and lip reading, the child can access the spoken language.
- Audiometric curve
If the audiometric curve has a particular dynamic phenomenon such as a recruitment (resulting in distortion of sensation intensity), the decoding of auditory perception is made more difficult for the child because the deformations generated further augment the difficulties of only raising the threshold of auditory perception.
- The effectiveness of adaptation prosthetic hearing
The prosthetic adaptation can be effective and to gain optimal if the prosthetic device is preceded by a diagnostic and audiometric curves rigorously established.
- The evolving nature of deafness or not
It is obvious that any gradual worsening of hearing loss disrupts the landmarks that the child had been set, requiring a readjustment of these recurring references.
- The uni-or bilateral deafness
It is understandable that bilateral disease is more disabling than unilateral involvement in child development.
Extrinsic factors of deafness:
- The intellectual potentialities of the deaf child
These must be effective because access to spoken language requires a certain capacity for abstraction.
- The appropriate care of the deaf child
A competent multidisciplinary team provides regular monitoring of this support.
- The appropriate environmental stimuli
It is essential to the harmonious development of the child, both in terms of psycho-emotional balance than on the spoken language, parents are motivated and invested in his education, and stimulate including a bath-friendly language .
Impact on voice and articulation:
Control of timbre and pitch of voice is imperfect in deaf children.
As we have already explained, the deaf babies between four and five months emits vocalizations perfectly similar to those of hearing child. It was only later that his voice may deteriorate.
Audiophonatory lack of control of the deaf child can lead nasalisations (due to lack of awareness of the closure of the soft palate) and confusion between close vowels like [u] and [y] such .
The psychological impact:
Early in life, communication of deaf children like hearing children is made of gestures, facial expressions, situations that lead the child to obtain satisfaction of his needs. Naturally, the hearing child perceives him, the voice of his mother reassures him.
The deaf child is often vulnerable, impulsive and may engage in violent anger that may be due to the simple fact of being misunderstood, but also to a discharge of anxiety in case of surprise, for example. We must not forget that the deaf child must supply his lack of vision by hearing that does not fully compensate the alert function, so if a person comes quickly behind him and he did not feel its presence, this may result in him a real panic.
The child may become "temperamental" or aggressive because it does not always understand the reactions of those around him and what he sees as the frustrations and he believes being arbitrarily imposed by its environment.
Deafness can lead to awkwardness regarding situations or people, the fear is renewing its "blunders" can make him lose his confidence. This kind of failures in communication situations can also cause loss of self esteem and a tendency to turn inward.
The impact drive:
Acoustic representation of the environment that normally structure from 0 to 3 years is not done in a spontaneous way in deaf children. Indeed, the hearing was crucial in identifying the spatial analysis of sounds that reflect the volume, size, movement, depth, terrain ...
The hearing impaired child who has no or little such information from the ear canal, actually difficult to adequately address space, which can manifest as psychomotor retardation and a certain awkwardness (difficulty coordinating movements, some , balance disorders ...)
Similarly, the rhythms and the notion of duration are elements usually analyzed by the system of hearing, deaf child receives the sequence of events wrong, his apprehension of time is disrupted. It is often frozen, lost, it's hard to anticipate.
The impact on intellectual and memory:
The intellectual faculties:
Deafness in itself does not sound on the intelligence of a child. However, the direct consequences of deafness (such as language delay or disorder) and a lack of support from the child's environment may make some acquisitions difficult.
Indeed, the language deficiency that can cause deafness sometimes leads to a delay in cognitive development, especially in intellectual acquisitions related to the perception of time and space in terms of reasoning and abstraction.
Impaired memory:
The hearing impaired child is using much of his vision to remember (visual memory is overdeveloped) in compensation for auditory information which it does not.
The repercussions of deafness on the personality of the child and adolescent deaf:
There are personality traits that are often found in children and young hearing impaired, and which are the consequences of a narcissistic wound on the fact that it must be built from the image of a body that is not perfectly healthy.
Symptoms that may arise from this narcissistic injury are:
• Anxiety, lack of self confidence and instability, intolerance to frustration, as the child tries to understand by all means the events that occur in its environment.
• Deaf child may also show irritable, aggressive or even violent, or conversely, to withdraw into himself when he fails to adapt to a situation, one can note that it is reassured by rituals, stable reference points that are repeated over time.
• A certain discomfort, a tendency to depression, including the period of adolescence, when the young hearing impaired is aware that deafness limited social relationships, choice of education and a profession, the possibilities of dating, which amplifies the vulnerability of adolescence.
Difficulties of symbolization sometimes lead young hearing impaired in the way of "acting out" that demonstrate their rejection of care they are subject. One can then observe a refusal to continue with speech therapy, the rejection of the prosthesis, or implant. We can consider that these are attempts to empower themselves and separate from their parents in what they represented constraints.
However it is necessary to emphasize that deafness is an attribute to random effects and there is no specific psychopathology of deafness, but there are deaf people who suffer in their own way of its effects.
Impact of deafness among parents and siblings:
Parents:
When, within a family is born a child with a disability, a "narcissistic injury" is inflicted on his parents whose psychological equilibrium is thereby disturbed normally. It should, however, that the multidisciplinary team following the deaf child to be vigilant that these disturbances remain transitional nonpathological reaction to the potential development of psycho child does find themselves limited or compromised. Parents need a place to speak to express their feelings following the upheaval of the family.
Weakened by the emotional feelings of guilt vis-à-vis their child's disability, parents may be a tendency to depression (and thus have lower educational requirements) or overprotection (and thus prevent their son from perform the experiments that are available to him).
Unlike the guilt, parents can also view a denial of their child's disability. Such positioning has the effect of placing the unconscious deaf child in a situation of abuse, since it is not recognized as it is, and is placed against requirements that go beyond its capabilities.
Siblings:
The theme of sibling rivalry that is involved in the majority of relationships between brothers and sisters here shows complicated by the handicap has one of the children of siblings.
The support of fraternal jealousy recognized as the sharing of time and affection between the children of parents here is all the more painfully felt by the siblings as a brother or sister deaf (e) is necessarily subject to more care from parents (some parents want to reduce their work in order to spend more time with their child). The sibling rivalry that can only be strengthened.
Moreover, this jealousy, which is usually feel guilty, is exacerbated because the siblings want to feel in such a feeling towards the deaf child who is ill and should rather be the object of their compassion. To compensate for this guilt, then the siblings can demonstrate overprotection vis-à-vis the deaf child, or conversely, a form of withdrawal by erasing the benefit of those who suffer most of the family, seeking to she can save her parents experienced.
However it must be emphasized that being the brother or sister of a deaf child can also induce sensitivity grown in human relationships, bring tolerance and the desire to devote oneself to a great cause, to act in the interests collective.