Unlocking Hearing World’s Doors : ‘Speech-Reading’ Key to Helping the Deaf Communicate

When Katie Gray’s first child, Margo, was born deaf 24 years ago from a rare hereditary condition called Waardenburg syndrome, it went undiagnosed until she was a toddler and was routinely examined for an ear infection.

When their second child, Nancy, was born deaf three years later, the Grays were “ready” to do everything they could to bring their child into the hearing world. Nancy wore two hearing aids at 3 months old, and her parents began a dedicated routine to teach her to lip-read.

“Every time I carried her down the stairs, I would say, ‘Down,’ ” recalls Katie Gray. “The whole day was spent repeating, repeating phrases that we wanted her to learn to recognize and eventually speak.

“Finally, we made progress. One day I was bathing Nancy; she was just a little one. I kept saying over and over, ‘Give mommy a kiss. Give mommy a kiss.’ When she finally gave me a kiss, I almost filled the bathtub with my tears.”

Most of the hearing world believes that sign is the “language of the deaf.” But children and adults who lose their hearing suddenly or gradually, and hearing parents whose baby is born deaf, soon learn otherwise.

Many Methods

There are many different ways for the deaf to communicate, from sign to cued speech, American Sign Language to total communication. Unfortunately, many of these methods are involved in an intensely emotional and political debate as to which is the best and most effective.

Lip-reading, or speech-reading as it now is called, is a 400-year-old oral communication that is one of those choices that is becoming more and more accessible to the 22 million hearing-impaired population in this country. It may not be as “visible” to the hearing world as sign, but it is making its mark, either used alone or in conjunction with other manual and oral methods.

“The vast majority of hearing people don’t even know the basics of sign language,” says Barbara Chertok, who is profoundly hearing-impaired and teaches speech-reading at Montgomery College in Bethesda. “If a hearing-impaired person wishes to communicate with a non-hearing-impaired person, they can’t--unless they lip-read.”

Lost Hearing at 21

Chertok, 52, suddenly lost almost all her hearing from a virus infection when she was 21 and just out of music school in Boston. Today, she wants it understood that she wasn’t a budding opera singer who was struck with tragedy. She already had decided to not make a career in music, she says, but from the moment her deafness took hold, she was determined to remain in the world of the hearing.

With lessons from a dedicated teacher, Chertok eventually worked in the hearing world, married a hearing person and raised hearing children. Now internationally know as an outspoken advocate of speech-reading, Chertok is so adept at it that she can read your accent or pick up a mispronunciation. If she doesn’t catch an important word that you are saying, she will ask you to repeat it and is annoyed if you “try too hard” to articulate. “Talk normally,” she directs.

Chertok’s ability to lip-read and speak flawlessly isn’t an anomaly. There are many hearing-impaired like her, she says, and her best example is her students. Her speech-reading classes at Montgomery College have tripled in size in just one year. Students, ranging from their 20s to 70s, sit in a single curved row facing Chertok. The students (some of them are not hearing-impaired) concentrate not only on the way one’s lips move over the consonant and vowel sounds, but on the body language and facial expression as well.

‘Invisible Sounds’

“Fifty percent of our speech is made up of look-alike sounds,” Chertok explains. “And 25% is made up of indivisible sounds. People ask, ‘How can you possibly do this if you are left with only 25 sounds to understand?’

“It’s because we don’t just lip-read, we speech-read for thought. Not word for word; that is impossible.”

It still is very difficult. The lighting must be right--you have to be able to see the lips. If the speaker stands against a window, or is too far across the room, the task may be impossible. It’s also hard to read the speech of someone with a thick mustache, or someone who doesn’t move his lips or enunciate normally or someone who puts his hands near or over his mouth as he talks.

For William Elkin, the advantages of speech-reading outweigh such difficulties. Elkin, one of Chertok’s students, is a 77-year-old retired medical statistician whose partial hearing loss was first discovered when he was in the fourth grade and the teacher “remedied” it by seating him in the first row.

Aids in Both Ears

By the time Elkin was in his early 40s, he was wearing a sizable hearing aid hitched to a bulky apparatus in his shirt pocket. Today, with most of his hearing lost in his good ear, Elkin wears a compact hearing aid in both ears. He says he would be “miserable without the help of speech-reading.”

“People aren’t aware that I read their lips,” says Elkin, “but I need the skill because I can’t understand what people are saying in crowds, or at social events. It’s the background noise that causes a problem. I have difficulty understanding speech, even though I hear the sound.”

All of the telephones in Elkin’s Bethesda home are equipped with an amplification device. And when he’s in a crowd, he uses a special microphone attached to the hearing aid.

Undaunted by the stigma his microphone may hold, Elkin’s philosophy is, “It’s a choice of understanding people or not understanding each other.”

Most proponents of speech-reading, and its collaborative methods, such as cued speech and total communication, say the use of hearing aids is essential to their program of learning.