Re-education of deafness: the verbo-tonal approach

Petar Guberina’s verbo-tonal method proposes a unique approach to the re-education of the hearing-impaired.

The re-education of deafness by the verbo-tonal method

any specialty whatever, makes it possible to obtain tangible results — and at times excellent ones — in handicaps considered serious, and even severe. In the re-education of hearing disorders one must therefore seek these optimal possibilities, those small segments that must be chosen and which are essential. Re-education must therefore proceed from the person — from the individual — who, although having a handicap, may furnish us with the optimal conditions for their own re-education. This optimum must be sought not only in the sense of hearing but in the whole body.

In the strict sense of hearing, the optimum is formed by transmitting speech with the help of the SUVAG apparatus through the frequencies to which the subject has remained most sensitive, even where it is a question of profound deafness. In this latter case, the stimuli of speech are transmitted through the skin — what is called somatosensory or bodily transmission — since the skin is most sensitive to the low frequencies. Little by little, and through the various frequency combinations, the field of listening and of production widens further and further.

By following this methodology, hearing-impaired children — including the profoundly deaf — who have no associated disorders, can integrate with hearing children in mainstream schools, communicating through speech. Here are the results of a few centres and countries dating from 1981 and 1988, where the children were integrated into mainstream schools: • 90% from the Centre at Ghent in Belgium, • 68% and 57% from two centres in France. The results of the SUVAG Centre are the following for the period from 1961 to 1988: •

number of pupils: 1,050, of whom 96% completed ordinary primary school, 88% completed secondary school, and 10% are following or have already completed studies in higher schools or at university. But the absence of speech, or the delay of speech, does not have an organic origin alone. The boundary between handicap and non-handicap becomes transparent in situations where children

have not acquired language because they have been deprived of maternal love, abandoned, or living in an environment that does not offer them emotional security. These are children who, owing to the difficult conditions of life in which they find themselves, manifest various language disorders. The lack of affection slows or perturbs the development of intelligence — sometimes even of motricity. Let us not forget the lot of children issuing from families of battered women, or of children who have themselves been objects of violence. What speech can they acquire, when the only communication they know is that of violence and suffering?

It is known today that the way out is the most difficult for these children. It follows that the optimal conditions for speech — or rather the preconditions — are found not in the organ of hearing, the ear, but in the affective environment. This handicap, which embraces a very high number of children, presents itself as a handicap of society. Human rights extended to the rights of the child will have a human and social content on the scale of the most elevated of human rights.

To arrive at a harmonious communication, it is necessary first of all that people understand one another, and not only within the family; there must also be understanding between people speaking different languages. In the domain of the learning of foreign languages, the verbo-tonal method is centred above all on this person-to-person communication through spoken language. It is for this reason that the SGAV method, elaborated with Professor Rivenc, places the emphasis on situations of everyday life and on understanding through the proposed context.

To address the problem of poor pronunciation, I set myself the fundamental question: how do we perceive the sounds of our mother tongue and, in general, the sounds of language? Can every person learn any language whatever? A capital experiment in our theory has shown that each vowel, if filtered through the various well-defined zones of frequency bands, is transformed into different vowels. Each vowel therefore contains all the vowels. Likewise each consonant, in principle, contains all the consonants. For each sound, there is an octave essential for its perception.

There is a very widespread erroneous idea, namely that there are peoples who are handicapped in learning a foreign language. We have advanced the hypothesis that the adult pronounces badly because they listen badly. The brain does not use all the frequencies of the sounds sent through the ear, but makes a selection among them. It seems that over the years each individual uses their mother tongue as a natural filter when perceiving sounds. That is why all the French make the same types of mistakes when they speak English, and the Japanese have their types of mistakes, which differ from those of the French.

It suffices to realise that children of any nation whatsoever born abroad learn any foreign language whatever just as the children of the country do. The same is true of pupils in any country who begin to learn a foreign language in a kindergarten with a good teacher. The results are excellent and rapid. Even later, from the age of nine and until puberty, pupils have the possibility of acquiring a foreign language correctly. After the age of puberty, the acquisition of a foreign language is far more difficult, because the brain has reached the stage where the mother tongue directs perception.

In fact, when an adolescent hears badly and pronounces badly the sounds of a foreign language, they are defending the listening system of their mother tongue. We have already underlined that in each vowel there are all the vowels and that in each