IV
What About the Baby's Speech?
The hearing baby babbles because he gets some pleasure from the sounds, and also because he desires to imitate the sounds of speech he hears around him. He has his attention called constantly to sound. The sense of vibration is not as strong nor as instructive as that of sound, but if the attention of the child is early called to it, a watchfulness for vibration from within himself as well as from without, can be aroused, and a sensitiveness developed that would not have come as early, if at all, without special, directive effort on the part of the mother. She can lead her little one to oo-oo, and ee-ee, and mamma, and bub-bub, etc., by doing these babblings herself while the baby is in her arms and his tiny hands are wandering over her lips and face and throat. These exercises will gradually bring a recognition on the part of the child of the sensation of vibration that accompanies voice, and they will give facility, coupled with the normal and natural intonations that have been acquired when he was not conscious of any effort, that will prepare him for a better and more fluent speech when the time comes for more exact articulation training.
But during the first two or three years of the child's life the principal stress should be placed upon his learning to understand what is said to him, without bothering much about his speaking himself. In the case of the hearing child, the understanding of language comes before he can himself utter it. This must also be the case with the deaf child, and the period preceding utterance must be longer, by reason of his handicap, than in the case of a child with normal hearing.
V
Developing the Mental Faculties
By the time he is two years old he has gained maturity and grasp enough to play many little educational games with his mother and his little brothers and sisters, or playmates. These games should be calculated to develop his various faculties, his powers of observation, memory, and concentration. To develop a faculty is really to train the brain. As a matter of fact, we see and hear and taste and smell and feel with our brains. The eye of a two-year-old child is practically as perfect an optical instrument as the eye of a boy of ten, and yet how much more the older boy seems to see. This is because his brain has been trained to interpret the impressions that even the baby eyes received but did not understand. Of course, where the instrument is found to be imperfect we can assist it by means of additional lenses, or perhaps by some one of the skillful operations now performed by oculists, and, as the sight is of such increased importance to a deaf child, the greatest care and watchfulness should be given to his eyes. Do not let him sleep, or lie, facing the sun, or any other powerful light, but throughout his life be careful that all his use of eyesight be under conditions of ample and well-directed light. Supposing that the simple tests referred to heretofore have shown that the eyes, as optical instruments, are sufficiently perfect, our efforts need to be to train the brain to take cognizance of, and to interpret the impressions transmitted to it by the eyes. We shall not be able to improve the working of the eye by our efforts, but we can educate the brain.
Color and form make the earliest appeal to the child's eyes, and we can use them for our educational play. The duplicate set of worsted balls of the seven primal colors can be increased to include easily distinguishable shades. The child can be sent on entertaining voyages of discovery around the room with a ball of a certain color to find other objects similar in color in the rugs, books, chairs, dresses, ties, etc.