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The Education of the Dyslexic under the Electronic Ear

Chapter from Éducation et Dyslexie*, by Dr Alfred A. Tomatis (Éditions ESF, “Science de l’Éducation” series,* 1972*).*

The Electronic Ear

This apparatus — which is at the very foundation of the techniques we have been using for many years — is an electronic complex whose aim is to help the ear to acquire its function of listening, of receptor of monitoring and inducer of laterality: three factors I have often evoked regarding the image of the child evolving normally towards language, when invested with the spoken function — and therefore with the power to monitor himself and to lateralise himself.

Now in, if not common, at least frequent use, the Electronic Ear allows the creation of a conditioning which obliges the ear to acquire its listening posture, through tympanic tension thanks to a regulation of the two muscles of the tympanic cavity — muscles of the malleus and of the stapes — which ensure, through the play of impedance adaptation, the passage of sound into the inner ear, the locus of analysis at the level of the first cellular relay of decryption of verbal coding.

It includes in particular two channels joined by an electronic gating, which leads the subject from an unaccommodated audition to a perfectly structured audition, at the same time as another set of electronic gates preferentially releases the right auditory channel. This does not mean that the left channel is eliminated, as one might believe, but simply means that it does not assume the same function of vigilance in listening. The whole is completed by a microphone, earphones, amplifiers operating on the two channels, and by a sound source most often constituted by a magnetic tape recorded and mounted on a high-quality tape recorder.

The Electronic Ear is an apparatus at once simple and complex: simple for the one who knows a little electronics, complex for the one whom the word “electronic” alarms. In reality, it is an ensemble of easy handling, automatic in all its functions. But what must be known is that, in fact, it is and remains only an instrument, and it requires a programme to be integrated into it. In other words, what must be learned by the pedagogue using the Electronic Ear is the use he can make of it, taking account of the different psycho-physiological stages of development of the child’s ear.

The redressing of dyslexia proceeds according to identical schemata which take account of these different stages — themselves a function of the relational problems lived by the child in the course of his evolution: relation first with the mother, then encounter with the father, then finally initiation into social life through the school environment.

The diaphragmatic opening of the ear

The infant’s ear does not suddenly open to the aerial sonic world. It does so progressively, in several stages — by purely mechanical adaptation at the outset, it seems, then by maturation of the nervous system thereafter.

Let us recall that during intra-uterine life, the foetus’s ear is essentially tuned to the frequencies of the amniotic liquid environment. The three parts of the ear — outer, middle and inner — are therefore acoustically adapted to the same frequencies, which are practically those of water and which lie largely beyond 8,000 Hz.

At birth, one witnesses a true sonic birth. The first two stages of the infant’s ear — the outer ear and the middle ear — will have to adapt to the impedances of the surrounding air, while the third stage represented by the inner ear keeps its liquid milieu. This is very important.

The first days after birth nonetheless leave the child in a state of transition on the plane of his sonic life. Indeed, the middle ear — and in particular the Eustachian tube — retains amniotic fluid for 10 days. So that the two stages, middle ear and inner ear, remain tuned to the same frequencies, those of the liquid environment — which, it is recalled, are those of the high stimulations necessary for cortical recharge and general tonus.

This very important phenomenon could explain, on the one hand, why for 10 days after his birth the infant shows a tonus he will then lose for several weeks during which his ear must adapt to the impedances of the air; on the other hand, one understands, in the light of these facts, what is meant by André Thomas’s remarkable “first name sign”. Before the child is 10 days old, he is sat on a table (which he does very easily thanks to this initial tonus), and one pronounces his first name. He does not react, so long as it is not his mother who is speaking. But when she begins to pronounce his first name, the infant directs his body towards her and falls on her side. This is an observation made consistently.

Does this mean that the child immediately recovers, thanks to his auditory apparatus still adapted to the impedances of water, the sonic relation he had with his mother in the course of his intra-uterine life? The fact deserves in any case to be noted.

The sonic shadow

After the tenth day, everything dims, I would venture to say. It is the great period of sonic shadow that begins. The Eustachian tube empties of its liquid substance, the infant loses his perception of high frequencies, he hardly hears any longer. He will have to, for weeks — through a long apprenticeship — seek to increase the power of accommodation of his middle ear, in order to find again, little by little, through the surrounding air, the contact he once had with that voice which lulled him in the depths of his uterine universe when he was still in his mother’s womb.

Progressively, around an axis lying between 300 and 800 Hz, the auditory diaphragm will open to the sonic world. While the “areu, areu!” sounds are produced, then the “mama, papa, dada”, the phonemes integrated, repeated, will slide towards the high frequencies. The child will thus little by little recover a tympanic tension that will allow him to relive a perception he knew during his foetal sonic life.

The dyslexic is precisely the one who, for affective reasons that have blocked him in his evolution, was unable to benefit from this ideal progression. We shall therefore, thanks to the Electronic Ear, have him travel the path he should have followed since his conception. We shall find him again in the uterus, we shall witness his birth into the aerial world, then we shall lead him quite naturally towards a well-elaborated language which will then allow him to meet the letter.

Programming of the educational cure

These different moments will therefore form the object of a sonic programming that can readily be inserted into a schema comprising three distinct stages: the filtered sounds, the performing and the training. May I be forgiven for thus employing a terminology that has value only in the use made of it by users of the Electronic Ear — but it is more practical for our demonstration to use the vocabulary long since assimilated by our technicians and our collaborators in France and abroad.

  • The period of “filtered sounds” will allow a reviviscence of intra-uterine life.

  • The following stage, called “performing”, will establish in the presence of the educator communication with the outside world through language.

  • The “training”, finally, will leave the subject alone with himself in a universe perfectly self-monitored.

Rhythm and duration

The educational cure will extend over a quarter in benign cases, a year in severe cases. There remain of course exceptional cases that it is impossible to direct in time with precision. However, the standards I have just stated prove valid in the great majority of cases.

The most favourable solution consists in scheduling a half-hour session every two days, that is, three times a week. It can only be applied for children living near the Centre equipped with Electronic Ears. For those who live further away (in the suburbs for instance), it is preferable to envisage providing two half-hour sessions twice a week. Finally, for children living very far from the Centre, or abroad, accelerated, intensive cures are provided, at the rate of four sessions per day (two in the morning, two in the afternoon) for periods extending from one to four weeks; this pace can be sustained without inconvenience.

Whatever the solution adopted, it is very important to ensure that the rhythm of the sessions be strictly observed. It is indeed a question of an osteo-muscular training of the ear which, to be effective, demands regularity in the effort. So it is pointless to have a dyslexic undertake an educational cure if one cannot have him follow the sessions according to the rhythm specified at the outset.

Filtered sounds

We call “filtered sounds” those we pass through electronic filters with a view to producing an audition identical to that we would obtain through layers of water.

Thanks to filtered sounds, we solicit, by memorisation of a previously revealed audition, the awakening of the desire for the most archaic relation: that with the mother. It is assuredly in the uterus that it must be sought.

The filtered sounds are generally made from the maternal voice. They can also be based on a musical modulation having characteristics of which we shall speak later.

The mother’s voice is recorded for half an hour under conditions that must allow, with a view to filtering, the conservation of high frequencies. So the recording must be made on a tape recorder of good performance — semi-professional preferably, linear up to 15,000 Hz, at a speed of 19 cm/s — and, of course, on a magnetic tape of good quality.

The mother is asked to read for half an hour a story which, in her view, would please the child. When the maternal voice is too deep — which happens frequently and already partly explains the difficulties of the child who, to meet his mother, has to diaphragm his listening on too-low pass bands — the recording is carried out through the Electronic Ear so as to preserve a high sheaf with a view to laboratory work. This consists in filtering beyond 8,000 Hz the sounds of the maternal voice and producing a sonic montage reproducing an audition through liquid layers recalling the uterine environment.

When the mother’s voice is lacking

This educational undertaking in filtered sounds retains all its effectiveness when it is conducted from the mother’s voice. The latter indeed seems alone capable of provoking with power the specific response of the mother-child relation. Another female voice gives much more variable results.

However, in cases of adoption which arouse — as is known — so many affective problems, it has happened that we have recorded the adoptive voice and provoked the intra-uterine sonic reviviscence from this voice. We have often obtained surprising results which have enabled us to make disappear in large part the tensions and blockages existing between the adoptive mother and the adopted child. There is here, I think, a very important opening for research concerning the acute problem of adoption.

When the maternal training in filtered sounds cannot be performed — either because the mother no longer exists (death, divorce), or because the conditioning takes place within a collectivity (at school for instance) — one then proceeds to a training in filtered music. The choice of the latter is very important, for not all music gives the same results. By experience, musical themes are all the more effective for being rich in high frequencies and close to the Mozartian rhythms or the Gregorian chants.

Twenty sessions

The period of filtered sounds corresponds to some twenty half-hour sessions during which the child is invited to draw, to play, to do puzzles, to occupy himself in a rather playful manner — without great attention on his part, so as not to offer resistance to this kind of deconditioning from which he is benefiting unawares.

From the beginning of the sessions in filtered sounds, the desire to listen generally manifests itself in the whole behaviour of the child who awakens, becomes animated, wants to communicate, is seized with an immense desire to live and to externalise himself, as though this sensory psychoanalytic memorisation allowed him to recover a past still virgin of all the conditionings of life.

Sonic birth

After these twenty sessions, we perform what we call sonic birth — that is, the passage from audition in an aquatic environment to audition in an aerial environment. This is generally done in the course of a session during which the mother’s voice is heard differently, the filtering descending from 8,000 to 100 Hz.

When this birth is achieved, we prepare the child for a new mode of sonic communication — through layers of air this time — so that he can recover the intimate relation he had with his mother during the last months of his foetal life. For just a few sessions, in an ontogenetic shortcut, we use the mother’s voice taking account of the sonic experience of the infant after the 10th day of his birth. It is first a blur he perceives, corresponding to the “hole” in which he is plunged when the middle ear empties of amniotic fluid and fills with air. He will then have to begin the hard path that will lead the ear towards a new accommodation. It is thus that little by little the fog lifts, a sonic glimmer appears on the horizon, the maternal voice is found again through a diaphragmatic opening that widens each day.

Thanks to electronics, the child will thus be able to relive, or to live, in two or three sessions this crucial moment of his human existence in the course of which he ought to have been born into the world through his maternal relation. I do indeed say “to live” for all those who precisely could not find, at the desired moment, at the other end of the communication, their mother’s voice. Placement in an incubator for certain premature infants, hospitalisation for certain others whose birth entailed serious difficulties, the absence of the mother for the abandoned child, the distance of the latter for others in circumstances sometimes involuntary, inevitable, prevent this reunion whose affective charge remains the essential element of the desire to live.

Performing: the encounter with the other

After these few sessions under the Electronic Ear — whose setting will remain the same as that fixed during the period of filtered sounds — the active phase will begin, which will lead the child towards an increasingly elaborate language. Abandoning the passively absorbed monologue, we direct the young apprentice of communication towards social life.

The maternal relation, which seemed one-way since it emanated from the mother alone, gives way in the child to the desire to elaborate dialogue. It is then that the encounter with the other — the other than the mother, as a rule the father — will be instituted through a preparation that must lead the child’s audition towards a listening to high sounds, increasingly monitored by the right ear.

While certain phonemes rich in high frequencies (what we call the truncated sibilants) are addressed to the child with a view to correct repetition under the Electronic Ear, right auditory lateralisation is effected progressively. The dominance of the right ear will increasingly be confirmed and lead the child towards a listening solidly self-monitored from this side.

These sessions of truncated sibilants, alternating with sessions of filtered music intended to relax the child and reassure him through a sonic bath that allays his anxiety, will prepare for the encounter with the father — bearer of the Verb and signifier of the right.

The paternal voice

From the 40th session, the injection of the paternal voice can be attempted. I insist on the word “attempted”: for it is not too strong to say that the presentation of the father’s voice, for some children, signifies the encounter with the bear or the ogre of the legend, with the undesired, with the adversary. So the sessions of paternal voice sometimes risk ending badly. One witnesses very spectacular aggressive reactions: the child becomes angry, cries, the earphones flying to the other end of the room. The educator must then intervene to soothe the young candidate. She ends the session with filtered music which relaxes and calms him.

It is fascinating to see how the injection of the paternal voice is one of the most extraordinarily explosive revealers. Its informational value is considerable. It reflects the image the child has of his father. It is very significant, in particular in the left-handed child who — by definition — is the one who refuses the right, the father, the Verb. Comfortably installed in his unique relation with the mother, the child deliberately rejects the father’s voice, that link with the environment, that launching ramp towards the exterior that ought to lead him towards a liberation which he refuses.

Phonatory counter-reactions

It is therefore, in this second stage which is that of performing and which succeeds the period of filtered sounds, a question of training the child to enter into verbal relation with his environment and to acquire, in consequence, a listening of good quality, entirely self-monitored. The participation of the subject is requested in the course of this second phase, since the child must repeat what he will have heard.

The phonatory counter-reactions at the level of the repetitions he will have to make during the “sonic blanks” will bring into play numerous parameters:

  • a) the first, audio-vocal, will have as their aim the regulation of intensity;

  • b) the others, audio-phonic, will govern timbre;

  • c) the following stage will bring into play the audio-phonetic system;

  • d) while in another stage, audio-phonemic regulation will take precedence;

  • e) finally, in a last stage, integration will be ensured when audio-psycho-phonological monitoring is acquired, thereby allowing the psycho-linguistic structure to be elaborated.

Which, in other less learned terms, means that the child will be obliged to speak loudly enough to be heard both by others and by himself; that he must see his timbre bloom forth — the signature of his nascent personality; know the flow of his rhythm — translation of his neuronal cadence which programmes itself and of his laterality which crystallises; finally store up the verbal capital up to the use, monitored by consciousness, of external information.

Training: meeting oneself

This stage being passed, it is to the “Training” that we ask the perfecting of what has been undertaken. The essential aim sought in the course of this period is to determine a more reinforced awareness of the self-monitorings necessary for the good execution of the spoken act — the one which leads then to the absolute mastery of the verbalisation of thought, and which must bring the child to meet himself.

Whereas the previous stage left him able to meet the other, to accept himself better, to practise in some sort a transference upon him, it is to find himself, to accept himself, that we wish in this third stage to lead the dyslexic. It is after a projection upon the other that we solicit in the subject a transference upon himself. From the moment he discovers himself as an integral part of a whole, the work is finished. The teacher can then instruct this head all ready to allow itself to be filled, without fear of seeing distorted the sonic material that he wishes to transmit.

This last phase of the educational cure — which is generally located from the 60th session — will therefore demand from the child an even more active participation. It is at this moment only that he may be asked to read under the Electronic Ear, to read himself in a way, to speak to himself, to meet himself. Thanks to the self-monitorings he will have acquired, he will then be able to decode easily and manipulate written language with which he will henceforth be able to juggle.

During this period, it is evident that the setting of the Electronic Ear will have to bring into play principally monitoring by the right ear, which remains the ear listening to language in its most ideally adapted postural form. This does not signify that the left is abandoned, neglected. It simply plays a different role, not intervening in the active functions of monitoring language.

Reading aloud

The child will however be asked — to consolidate the results acquired — to train himself daily to read and learn his lessons aloud, informing his right body, addressing himself to his right hand. It is truly regrettable that this habit of reading aloud and intelligibly has been lost, so true is it that this is the mode — the most archaic doubtless, but also the most neuro-physiological — allowing the integration of information while at the same time bringing to the cortex the energy necessary for this integration.

Every child and every adult should be able to train themselves for at least half an hour and up to four hours per day in reading aloud, to bring into play the circuits which — through the channel of the right ear — ensure the true memorisation of acquired knowledge. What has been learned aloud is never forgotten. Such a process is perhaps longer than that involved in eye reading, but how much more effective. Would it not be wiser to learn less, but to learn well?

Results obtained

In the progression of the educational cure, the most remarkable modifications bear on the voice, which becomes timbred, modulated; on a better intelligibility of speech thanks to a better assured monitoring.

Laterality crystallises on the right — even in the most recalcitrant left-hander — bearing witness to right auditory dominance. The mobility of the face accentuates the asymmetry through a greater motor activity on this side. The synkinesias previously signalled in the initial assessment disappear; a few movements nonetheless subsist at the level of the right thumb-index pincer.

The results obtained moreover, following these different audio-vocal awakenings, are manifested in particular by:

  • a greater stability of behaviour;

  • a loss of aggressiveness;

  • a calmer, deeper sleep, without nightmares;

  • a normalisation of appetite;

  • the appearance of a hitherto unknown euphoria.

The child becomes joyful, happy to live. Freed from all his impedimenta, he participates fully in the activities that give him the notion of existing.

On the plane of expression, one also notes a greater mastery of ideas which entails an improvement in writing performance. The recitation of texts — prose and poetry — is done with ease. The school report card reveals good marks in history, geography, natural sciences. The temporo-spatial notions which are introduced in parallel with the crystallisation of right laterality explain the enormous progress made by the child in the domain of arithmetic and mathematics.

Here then in sum is a very positive outcome which — while liberating the child from his heavy burden — euphorises at the same time the environment, modifies the family structure, suppresses collective anxiety, soothes the household.

Parental initiation

It is well however to ask of the parents — for whom the only valid criteria of success are school results — to show understanding and patience throughout the educational cure. It will thus be necessary to inform them of all the reactions, sometimes lively and often unexpected, that the child may have during the few months that must liberate him from his dyslexia.

On the mother’s side

This parental initiation will be addressed first to the mother, who must accept during the first period — that of filtered sounds — the assaults of the child which will occur either in a too affectionate mode (because dynamised by a reinforcement of the mother-child couple), or in an aggressive, vindictive mode, the child seeming to wish to liquidate a past for which he holds the mother alone responsible.

She must therefore allow this critical period to pass with calm, during which there will be established an extraordinary duet of love, interspersed with often violent scenes, from which there will arise the hitherto unsuspected equilibrium. The attitude we counsel her is to endure with a smile this somewhat unpleasant moment, without reacting to the repeated retorts and provocations of the child. Any too brutal intervention would indeed block, in large part, the evolution of the cure by new withdrawals of the guilt-ridden child.

On the father’s side

Information for the father will then be necessary to acquaint him with the relational problems and their repercussions in the family constellation. He will also have to be made aware of the considerable help he will be in a position to bring by accepting this linguistic bridge that is dialogue. The encounter of the child with his father remains an essential element of social communication. It is difficult to achieve. It demands, on the father’s part, a very great availability, an openness, a broad understanding of the child’s psyche.

A word to the teacher

It often happens, at the family’s request, that I make contact with the teacher to keep him informed of the modifications likely to arise in his pupil, and to request from him some patience joined with indulgence — notably when it is a question of a left-hander who risks finding himself, for a few days, at variance with his laterality. The passage to the right may entail, on the plane of writing, transitory difficulties in rhythm (the child then writing more slowly than the others) and in graphic learning.

Towards early detection

The techniques of audio-vocal education we have just studied therefore seem to bring a very positive solution to the redressing of pedagogical and psycho-pedagogical deficiencies. They are of course only a stage, only a springboard for other research — but they retain, within a problem whose urgency cannot escape either parents or teachers, a certain value through the efficacy they present.

The necessity of coming to the aid of children in school difficulty is all the more imperative in that dyslexia daily gains ground, given the family and social structures which install themselves within the framework of modern life. Encounters become rarer and rarer — often even impossible — that bring into presence father and son. The mother increasingly leaves her activities pertaining to the home for a professional outside work. The child is entrusted to a third party from the first months of his life. The interpretation of these daily abandonments felt by the infant, or the very young child, has nothing comparable with what the adult ends by accepting through necessity.

What is to be wished is that one should henceforth be more aware of the presence of this lack, that one should know how to seek it out, that one should be able to detect it — not only in the course of schooling, but better still before it, in the child not yet introduced into the cycle of teaching, in kindergarten for instance, which seems to me the locus of choice for detection and for the correction to be made.

Every child who speaks poorly or who does not speak, who expresses himself with difficulty, who presents disorders of laterality, who seems distracted, in the clouds, who cannot fix his attention, who marks temporo-spatial deficiencies, etc. — should be detected before even the difficulties before the letter appear as a revealing element. The whole train of signs of dyslexia is already installed, and the assessment which allows its verification refers, as has been seen, at no moment to reading.

It is easier, of course, to help a pre-school dyslexic than to undertake to educate a child arrived at secondary studies. The cure will be all the more rapid as the child is younger and has not accumulated the setbacks of a poorly begun schooling.

It is not forbidden either to hope that these techniques may soon be placed at the disposal of pedagogues, so that there may be carried out on the spot, within the school itself, the redressing of the deficiencies the child presents on the plane of integration. In France and abroad, numerous schools now apply these methods which allow the disappearance in a few months of this “dyslexia” handicap, whose dramatic consequences for the child’s future are now known.

— Pr Alfred A. Tomatis. Chapter from Éducation et Dyslexie*, Éditions ESF, “Science de l’Éducation” series, 1972.*