Rootless wanderers.
U P Seidal · BMJ · 1973
different speech sound if it is associated with a different speech source.3This latter observation is particularly relevant to the earliest stage of language learning-the child will be unable to make progress if he cannot equate his sounds with those made by the adults around him-and possibly to some cases of language impairment in the adult since if this ability to abstract is absent there might be no speech comprehension presented with otherwise normal hearing.In the fairly near future this background knowledge will prov:de the basis for a speech pattern audiometry which will be truly in- termed'ate between the classical pure tone and speech audiometric tests.Though its test stimuli are computer-generated and far more complex than those which are at pre- sent used, they can be tape-recorded and used clinically with quite simple and reliable apparatus.In addition to this we can expect eventually to see the employment of speech therapy techniques which depend on the analysis and display of speech pattern features,4 and the use of synthetic speech for the blind5 and as a prosthetic speech aid for those who are entirely without expressive speech.These technical developements which are :kely to stem from the use of our present knowledge of speech patterns will probably be paralleled by an increase in our under- standing of the mechanisms which underly the speech mode of perception.The ex- perimental techniques which have made hemispheric s-pecialization more accessible to measurement6 and those which are be- ginning to define the role of short-term audi- tory memory in speech processing7 may be capable of extension so that the process of speech pattern encoding itself is better un- derstood.This rather superficial survey will have achieved its purpose if I have at least indicated how audiometric stimuli could, tc advantage, be related to the nature of speech itself.