De Spraak- en Taalgestoorde Mens

Abstract

Confrontation with deviant, unexpected behavior often leads to uneasiness, uncertainty and fear, and, finally, to discrimination. People with speech defects or language disturbances are different because they sound different; they can even sound slightly frightening sometimes, but they are completely harmless and certainly not half-witted. This paper presents some general advice and some specific recommendations for encounters with those people. Generally: focus on the content of the conversation and try to forget what is wrong with the presentation; never raise your voice unnaturally; do not simulate understanding; if you want to help in cases of misunderstanding, paraphrase in simple words and short sentences what you think your partner intends to say; as far as your own speech is concerned, speak slowly and simply and do not overarticulate; finally, use of mimics, pantomime, gestures and the like is helpful. Specifically: aphasies all have word-finding difficulties and often use the wrong word. Some of them (Wernicke a.) have more speech and language fluency, others (Broca a.) have less, but this does not correlate with their capacity for understanding language. They can be emotionally disturbed, and they all need social communication. People who are hard of hearing obtain their language in-formation from both their ears and their eyes, through lip-reading, Make sure your mouth is clearly visible; avoid background noise, and keep your head still. With the deaf, misunderstandings are sometimes unavoidable: let your deaf part-ner handle such instances, for he has the experience. Be aware of the language disturbance (mostly syntactic) that can occur besides the poor speech. Finally: do not begrudge the deaf their own manual communication (if they want to use it) among themselves.