Technology that lets deaf people hear has a downside: it threatens sign languages Jul 20th 2013 |From the print edition http://www.economist.com/news/international/21582038-technology-lets-deaf-people-hear-has-downside-it-threatens-sign-languages-listen-up
BORN profoundly deaf, William Mager, a film-maker, gained some hearing in December. It was technical wizardry, not a miracle: a cochlear implant in his head which turns sounds into nerve signals. Switched on in a glossy central London hospital, it prompted “probably the worst day of my life”, he says. Harsh, robotic sounds bombarded his brain. Now things are improving. The noises are becoming “meatier and richer” as his brain learns to interpret the din. Around 220,000 people worldwide have had cochlear implants since the devices were approved in the 1980s. They typically allow deaf people around 70% of normal hearing. That might seem like unalloyed good news: surely some hearing is better than none? But not all deaf people are keen or grateful. Some protested outside hospitals when the new devices came in. It is demeaning, they feel, to be viewed as a problem to be fixed. And the gadgets threaten their culture. Though Mr Mager still uses sign language, people with the implant and their friends, colleagues and families need it less. That undermines the struggle by users of the 200-odd sign languages to be recognised as linguistic minorities. New technologies mean more worries for deaf activists. A recent paper by the University of Miami concluded that in a decade most of the genes linked to deafness will be identified. That could lead to easier treatment (or, some fear, the abortion of fetuses bearing those genes). Implants are getting cleverer, too. A three-year-old from North Carolina is the first child in America to have one wired directly into his brainstem. A touching video of the boy hearing his father speak for the first time has gone viral. Yet Joe Valente, a deaf professor of early-years education at Pennsylvania State University, points at research showing the risk of infection from cochlear implants, particularly for the young. Deaf children with implants who use only spoken language perform worse at school than their peers who learn sign language. Cristina Hartmann, a deaf lawyer from New York who received her implant at the age of six, complains that even after a decade of speech therapy she did not talk and hear like a normal person. And 70% hearing is still a handicap: certain pitches can be inaudible and noisy places confusing. More than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, who typically take decisions with little knowledge of deaf culture or politics. The idea that deafness is not a disability, for example, strikes many outsiders as perverse. Two cases in recent years of deaf couples looking for congenitally deaf sperm donors to ensure deaf offspring prompted derisive media coverage. Yet deaf culture is not just the preserve of ideologues. In sign-language circles, each person has a sign name, usually based on physical appearance. A man with a big nose, for instance, might be referred to with a Pinocchio-like gesture. Distinct social customs abound: switching lights on and off to get a room’s attention, for example. Deaf raves, with organ-shaking bass and sign-language rappers, have large followings; so does deaf theatre. Thousands of athletes will attend the Deaflympics in Bulgaria this month. Technology could wipe out all that. In America the share of deaf children taught by sign language has fallen from 55% to 40% in the past decade. Other countries show similar patterns. Deafness will not disappear, says Trevor Johnston, a linguistics professor at Macquarie University in Australia, but it needs at least to be studied as a cultural relic before it withers. Colin Allen, president of the World Federation of the Deaf, a human-rights group based in Helsinki, says the real worry is not about the technology itself, but the perception that sign language is redundant. A UN convention on disability may provide some protection: the deaf lobby in Kosovo used it when campaigning for legal protection of their language and culture. In South Africa it helped shape national policy which encourages school-leavers fluent in sign language to teach deaf students. Come again? The irony is that, even as sign language declines among deaf people, it is attracting new adherents among the hearing. A book called “Baby Signs”, published in America in 1996, spawned a business that teaches signing to hearing children in over 30 countries. It claims that hearing children who learn some sign language are ahead of their peers by 12 IQ points at the age of eight. Britain plans to introduce a GCSE (an exam usually taken by 16-year-olds) in sign language. In America 90,000 college students study it: a figure that has risen eightfold since the millennium, and almost as many as still study German. -- Avinash Shahi Programme Executive at Score Foundation To know more,Why not visit our Website: http://www.eyeway.org/ And M.Phil Research Scholar at Centre for The Study of Law and Governance JNU Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. 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