Consonants are essential to speech intelligibility and require oral pressure to be produced.
Negative oral pressure is typically necessary for sucking, although food intake can be achieved, with difficulty, using an assist from gravity.
Positive oral pressure, however, is totally necessary to the production of most consonants...and consonants, more than vowels, are critical for speech intelligibility.
As severe as this structural problem is on the development of speech, it is equally threatening to the development of language. The impact on the parent- child relationship is potentially disastrous, if not understandable. The mother has been enduring much discomfort in the anticipation of a tiny "cherub." Instead, she is presented with a child having an awesome hole where his/her face should be!
Cleft lip and cleft palate can cause additional problems of parental rejection which results in a deprivation of important referents for the child.
The over powering disappointment may result in an initial rejection of the child by the mother.
In some cases the family may even disintegrate.
The end result is a serious reduction in referents (interaction with the mother) in those important first hours of life.
This can have measurable consequences months down the line.
This disorder can be more extensive than just a cleft lip or palate.
The openings can extend clear up to the eye sockets, which themselves, may be located on the side of the head, like a rabbit.
Despite these anomolies in structure, this would be my disorder of choice if I had to make such a decision. With today's medical advancement, the position of the eyes can be corrected surgically.
Parents need to know that the prognosis for a normal life for the Cleft Lip and/or Palate child is extremely good.
Most clefts can be repaired. Those that canÅt be closed can be prosthetically corrected.
Teams of specialists are available in hospitals that will coordinate all the services the child will need.
Included is a social worker, who will seek out funding sources for the childÅs rehabilitation.
Providing that the clefts are not part of a greater syndrome associated with other problems, the prognosis for a normal adult life for the child is outstanding.
When armed with this knowledge, parents can perhaps overcome their disappointment and be able to appreciate and accept the good qualities that their child possesses.
This will help to insure that the child will get those important early referents that help to create a strong cognitive and language base.
The major impediment to the Expressive Transducer's function is Paralysis
Even if the structures are all present, the transducer must also be able to function. The major impediment to function is paralysis.
Two kinds of paralysis are flaccidity and spasticity. Flaccid paralysis is a loss of strength in muscle movement.
A mild example (and a temporary one, I hope) is when I sleep on my arm and find it immobile in the morning.
I couldn't even make the sign for "help" in sign language because it takes two hands.
More serious examples are Infantile paralysis (which effected President Franklin D. Roosevelt) and Amy Lateral Sclerosis (which effects Steven Hawkings today).
In the latter case, speech eventually became impossible and communication must be accomplished through a man made transducer--a computer.
In cases of paralysis the function of the Expressive Transducer (speech) may be emulated by computers.
Equally debilitating is spastic paralysis. For just about every movement in the body, there are two sets of muscles involved--the agonists and the antagonists.
They must coordinate in perfect balance for each movement, no matter how small, to occur smoothly. When this process fails, the movements become jerky or locked.
Cerebral palsy is an example of childhood spacticity. This can be so severe that the child may never even learn to walk or crawl, let alone learn to talk.
Again, computers may be the only means available to communicate.
Continuing now, our discussion of transducers, the expressive transducer (speech) changes patterns of electro-chemical impulses in the speakerÅs nervous system into patterns of mechanical energy (sound waves) in the environment.
It takes a second (receptive transducer) to convert it back into electro-chemical impulses in the listenerÅs brain.
The Receptive Transducer for Aural Communication is the ear. It is the Perceptual processes, however, that enable us to hear.
The receptive transducer, that converts sound waves back into electro-chemical impulses, is the ear.
As remarkable as the ear is (and we will talk about it in depth later), it is nothing more than a transducer. It simply changes energy form.
Hence we do not really hear with our ears. That is an even a more complex process left to the devices of the brain itself. That is basically the realm of perception.
Perception is the structuring and organizing of those impulses that have been transduced.
It is the interpretation of those impulse patterns by the brain which become the NOW of our existence.
It is a bundle of neurological processes that work together to give us the experiences of sight, sound and touch.
We will be talking in detail about many of these process later, but let me give one example now.
The Receptive Transducers converts only a small portion of the stimulus, but it is more than the brain can process.
The energy of the signal for vision is electro-magnetic waves. Short waves are transduced to be experienced as a violate color and long waves as red.
There are shorter waves than violate, however, that our transducers arenÅt equipped to convert (eg., xrays and gamma rays) and likewise longer waves (eg., radio waves).
Lined up on a football field from shortest to longest electro-magnetic waves, the light spectrum we are sensitive to would occupy the width of a...blade of grass! We are, in an absolute sense, severely visually impaired.
The case is similar for hearing. Curiously, however, this may be a good thing, since the brain can only process per unit of time, 7 bits of information. Try to remember a 14 digit telephone number and you will see what I mean.
Figure-ground discrimination is one perceptual process.
The transducers, limited as they are, all take in more information than our brains can process.
To keep from being over-laoded, the brain will structure the incoming stimuli into two fields: the figure and the ground.
The figure is the portion of the stimuli that is relevant to our immediate needs. It is strengthened and accentuated in our experience.
The ground is the remaining portion of the stimulus input. It is suppressed in our consciousness.
Hence, a much lesser stimulus array needs to be actually processed by the brain.
When the figure-ground process fails, the end result is a stimulus overload.
The child or adult's brain is bombarded with everything that has been transduced, much of which is irrelevant to our needs.
The Language Bridge is a chain of processes which joins two human brains.
The end result is confusion, distractibility, emotional overly and poor understanding.
When all the processes are working, however, the stage is set to effectively join those human computers we call the brain.
This then, (see the grahic version for a visual representation of the string of processes)is the Language Bridge--from referent to concept to symbol to mixer to transducer on the expressive side; from transducer to perception to symbol to concept to referent on the receptive side.