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New Breakthrough Discovery Offers Hope to the Deaf
Muscles and receptors in the mouth and throat retain a memory of their position and feeling when a word is uttered, and their signals provide key input for the brain as it hones the power of speech, they suggest.
Researchers David Ostry and Sazzad Nasir at McGill University in Montreal carried out an unusual experiment into an enduring mystery: why is it that many deaf people are still able to speak coherently, sometimes years after losing their hearing?
They recruited five middle-aged people who had lost their hearing in adulthood and were now profoundly deaf but had a cochlear implant to pick up sounds.
With the implant turned off, the five were asked to repeat four specific words while the front of their lower jaw was gently pulled forwards by a small device attached to their bottom row of front teeth.
The movement was only tiny but it was sufficient to deform the sounds emitted from the volunteers' mouth.
The point of the experiment was to see whether the volunteers were able to adapt to the sudden speech deformation, even if they could not hear the sound they were making.
The four words were "saw," "say," "sass" and "sane," chosen because their vowel, dipthong and fricative -- the hiss of the "s" -- require a very precise jaw position to be pronounced intelligibly.
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