Dyslexia, mental deficiency and the Electronic Ear

Communication presented at the 4th International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology*,* Madrid, 13-15 May 1974*, by* Dr K. Spirig (Antwerp Centre, Belgium). Association Internationale d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie, 9 boulevard des Philosophes, Geneva (Switzerland).

Dyslexia, mental deficiency and the Electronic Ear. Why are so many children in listening difficulty, and how can the Electronic Ear set their development going again?

Introduction

My intention is to speak to you of the children one very frequently encounters in today’s world, and who pose numerous problems of intelligibility; I should like in particular to speak to you of those who present difficulties on the plane of listening. This does not mean that I shall evoke here the case of deaf children, but rather that of children who seem not to understand, not to integrate what is told to them, what is taught to them. These are children who are often distracted, who have difficulty concentrating.

Apart from organic anomalies which may really exist on the visual, motor or auditory planes, we must think of the psychological origins of these difficulties — whose influence on the processes of listening remains incontestable. This leads me to speak to you of the close relations that exist between audition and the psyche, between the ear and language, between the being and his environment. It is the vast problem of communication that is posed to us: communication with oneself, communication with the other through oneself.

For the message to be transmitted to the interlocutor, it must in the first place be self-controlled. When I speak, I must be master of my words, I must be able to regulate the rhythm, the timbre, the intensity of my voice, and verify the semantic value of my language. I listen to what I say. There is self-information.

I. Experimental data

What happens when a subject begins to speak? Four elements intervene: the cortex, which gives the order; the organ of speech; the surrounding air; and — coming in fourth position but holding a primordial place — the ear as receiving station, the sensor necessary for the realisation of self-control.

The Tomatis Effect: “one speaks as one hears”

At the beginning of his research, Tomatis was grappling with two kinds of individual. On the one hand, the singers who, after a few years of career, encountered difficulties with their voice, which lost its harmonics. At the time, everyone believed that this phenomenon was due to the poor state of the vocal cords. It appears today that that is not where the problem lies. On the other hand, this researcher examined workers and pilots of the Paris Arsenal, who became deaf as a result of sonic traumas.

One of Tomatis’s first concerns was to find a system allowing one to verify whether the deafness was real or simulated. By making comparisons between the audiograms of the singers and those of the Arsenal workers, he was surprised to see that the deficient frequencies on the audiograms were also absent on the vocal spectrum.

If one artificially filters the frequencies above 600 Hz in the listening of a subject with normal hearing, the vocal analysis of this subject immediately gives the image of a worker presenting a traumatic deafness. Better still: if one provokes a scotoma at 1,000 Hz for instance, one observes the same scotoma in the analysis of the spoken voice.

Tomatis arrived at the following conclusion: “The voice contains only the harmonics one can actually analyse on the plane of listening.” In short: one speaks as one hears. Or, more clearly: one uses, in the spoken voice, only the harmonics one can control auditorily. That is the famous Tomatis Effect.

The directing ear

A second essential point concerns auditory laterality. Tomatis carried out a vast experiment on great opera singers endowed with a fine voice. At first, he let them sing while controlling themselves with both ears by means of headphones. Then he “dazzled” the right ear by electronic means — putting it out of circuit — in order to force the subject to self-control with the left ear.

The result: the disappearance of a whole series of harmonics. The rhythm slowed to the point where sometimes the singer had to stop, unable to make up the accumulated delay. The subject declared himself tired, oppressed, and having difficulty preserving the accuracy of his voice.

Conversely, by blocking the left ear and letting the subject self-control with the right ear, one obtained an even fuller sheaf of harmonics than with both ears. The subject would then indicate that it was “very pleasant” to sing in these conditions, that he felt light, euphoric.

A similar experiment, carried out on virtuoso violinists, gave the same results. And one of them declared, when he was made to self-control with the left ear: “Not only am I hampered in playing, but I can no longer move my fingers.” This shows how much all psycho-motricity depends on audition.

Done with actors, in the domain of the spoken voice, the experiment gave identical results: speaking while listening to oneself from the left ear provokes a delay in rhythm (which may sometimes go as far as stammering), a disorder of timbre, difficulties of concentration, attention, expression of thought, and finally great fatigability.

Tomatis thus brought to light the directing ear: only the right ear controls the spoken voice and the sung voice. If it is deficient, disorders set in on the plane of rhythm, timbre and articulation.

The musical ear

Thanks to the many singers he had the possibility of examining on the auditory plane, Tomatis was able to establish an ideal curve: ascending from 500 to 2,000 Hz, with a slope of 6 to 18 dB/octave.

If there is a scotoma of 5 or 10 dB in this zone, musicality is perturbed.
A deficiency between 500 and 1,000 Hz: the subject cannot appreciate music, judge its accuracy.
A scotoma between 1,000 and 2,000 Hz: the subject sings out of tune.
Beyond 2,000 Hz: the voice loses its harmonics, its quality — the subject sings in tune but no longer sings beautifully.
If the whole curve is altered between 500 and 2,000 Hz: amusicality.

The ethnic ear

In this domain, Tomatis carried out a wide experiment starting from an observation made on singers: the Venetians could not pronounce the “r” from the tip of the tongue (and replaced it with “l”), whereas the Neapolitans were capable of it. Did there exist a Venetian ear different from a Neapolitan ear?

Extrapolating, Tomatis asked himself whether there existed an English, French, German ear, and so on. On more than a hundred idioms studied, he found only twelve ways of hearing. Each ethnic group presents specific passbands — elective, selective zones in which the frequential affinities of a language are encountered.

A few examples:

French: two peaks, one at 250 Hz and the other at 1,500 Hz (nasalisation zone).
English: a curve ascending towards the highs from 2,000 Hz up to 12,000 Hz — whence the richness of the sibilants.
Spanish: importance of the lows up to 500 Hz, plus a sheaf between 1,500 and 2,500 Hz.
German: dome in the low and middle frequencies, up to 3,000 Hz.
Russian: a very extensive field, from the lows to the highs — whence the extreme facility of the Slavs in learning foreign languages. Their widely open auditory diaphragm enables them to grasp all the acoustic nuances of the various ethnic groups.
Dutch: low zone, between 125 and 500 Hz approximately — close to Spanish.

II. Clinical data: auditory selectivity

If we speak like our parents — with the same frequencies, the same intonations, the same rhythm — it is because we have lived in a sonic bath of a certain quality, and because our ear has been exercised under conditions well defined on the acoustic plane. The child uses a good part of his time to realise this adaptation, first to find again the voice of his mother who has rocked him throughout his intra-uterine night, and then to encounter his environment without which he cannot grow.

Tomatis defined selectivity thus: “the faculty of the human ear to perceive a variation of frequencies within the sound spectrum and to locate the direction of this variation”.

The examination reveals to us that dyslexic children in general — and a large number of mentally deficient children — do not manage to make this differentiation of sounds, nor to indicate the direction of their variation. If you play them, for example, sounds from 8,000 Hz down to 500 Hz, they do not know in what way they are different, nor whether they are lower or higher one relative to the other. They have no point of reference on the plane of listening.

How could you expect a child — incapable of distinguishing variations of tonal height — to be able to distinguish variations as subtle as those that separate m and n, p and b, v and f, q and g? His ear does not perform an analysis fine enough to discern these differences of sound between two letters close on the frequential plane.

The origin of listening difficulties

What is the origin of these difficulties? Factors of a psychological and affective order intervene to a great extent. They prevent the child’s ear from opening normally to the outside world. There is fixation at a determined stage, with a view to non-communication. On the auditory plane, one notices that the ear remains in a “blurriness” corresponding to a non-accommodation.

For the child to come to listen, he must accommodate the sound images, just as he does with vision. This process of auditory accommodation is performed by means of two small muscles of the middle ear: the muscle of the hammer (linked to the tympanic membrane) and the muscle of the stirrup (which regulates the pressures of the oval window).

If auditory accommodation is insufficient — for example because of a hypotonia of the musculature of the middle ear, which is what happens most of the time — the reaction to noise and sounds does not occur properly.

III. Dyslexics

Audio-vocal education under Electronic Ear consists in recreating the conditions of the normal development of listening. We bring the child again through the stages: return to intra-uterine listening (sounds filtered from the maternal voice), sonic birth (passage from liquid to aerial audition), first active phase (encounter with the father’s language, sibilants, right directing ear), second active phase (reading, singing, self-control).

The Electronic Ear makes it possible to condition the muscles of the middle ear so that the ear acquires a listening posture. The hammer and the stirrup receive a true gymnastic training, which restores the function of auditory accommodation — and with it, the capacity for fine discrimination of sounds and phonemes.

IV. The mentally deficient

In the mentally deficient, the same signs are frequently found: very closed auditory selectivity, psychogenic transmission hypoacusis, auditory laterality not established or inverted. Many of them are not deficient in the organic sense, but functionally blocked in their listening. Treatment under Electronic Ear, by its capacity to awaken the child’s ear and to recreate the sonic route of normal development, brings these children up to a functioning often well above that supposed of them.

Attention, memory, the capacity for concentration, general tonus are awakened; language is structured; and with it, operational intelligence takes its rights. Many children labelled deficient are in reality only children whose ear — and with it, the nervous system — has never received the adequate stimulations to set itself in a posture of functioning.

V. Tomatis’s theories on auditory physiology

The pneumogastric nerve

The eardrum is innervated, in its external part, by the pneumogastric nerve (10th cranial pair) — the great parasympathetic nerve which holds under its sway the innervation of the larynx, the pharynx, the lungs, the heart and the viscera. It is the nerve of visceral anxiety, but also the one that ensures the soothing and putting into coherence of the organism.

When the eardrum tightens adequately under the effect of a training by the Electronic Ear, the vagus nerve is modulated — whence the effects commonly observed in subjects in treatment: regularisation of intestinal transit, soothing of psycho-somatic manifestations, improvement of sleep. Audio-psycho-phonology is thus naturally linked to psychosomatic medicine.

Auditory laterality

Auditory laterality is more fundamental than motor laterality (hand, foot) or sensory laterality (eye) — which are its consequences. It reflects the relational posture of the subject: who controls his language? The mother’s ear (left) or the father’s ear (right)? The ear of the inside or that of the outside?

Normal development leads the child from left laterality, proper to the primary relation with the mother, towards right laterality — that of social language, of the verb, of structured communication. Dyslaterality translates the blockage of this passage. The work under Electronic Ear consists precisely in causing the audio-vocal control to tilt towards the right — without, however, abandoning the left, which retains its role of receptivity, memory, mental imagery.

VI. Some results

Clinical experience shows, in dyslexic children in treatment:

a crystallisation of right laterality, even in the most recalcitrant left-handers;
an improvement of vocal timbre and articulation;
the disappearance of facial syncinesias and postural disorders;
a stabilisation of behaviour: less aggressiveness, calmer sleep, normalisation of appetite, the appearance of a euphoria of living;
on the scholastic plane: improvement of performances in reading, spelling, composition, calculation, mathematics, history, geography;
in the mentally deficient: recovery of often unsuspected cognitive capacities, a process of socialisation, relational opening.

These results — observed in France, in Belgium, in Switzerland, and in the many international centres applying the Tomatis techniques — corroborate the pertinence of the theory that underpins them. They are not placebo effects: they are the direct consequence of work on the ear, the central organ which — through the functions of cortical charge, of equilibration and of audition — presides over the whole posture of the being in his environment.

VII. Conclusion

Audio-psycho-phonology is not a simple technique of help to dyslexics or the mentally deficient. It is a theoretical refoundation of the place of the ear in human psycho-physiology, and a practical refoundation of re-education through listening.

The Electronic Ear is only an instrument. It has meaning only in the service of a broader project: to allow the child — or the adult — to set himself in motion again in his relation to the world, through the royal road which is listening. Dyslexia, mental deficiency, are then no longer considered as fatalities: they become stages one can traverse, on condition of recovering the right posture of the ear.

It is this hope — theoretically founded and clinically verified — that I wish, in closing, to share with you.

— Dr K. Spirig (Antwerp Centre, Belgium). Communication at the 4th International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, Madrid, 13-15 May 1974. Association Internationale d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie, Geneva.