Silent Speech

Kari Harrington is seven years old and a victim of severe cerebral palsy. Thus she lacks the muscular coordination necessary for controlled movement and speech, and is virtually restricted to a wheelchair. Like many other victims of the disease, she will never be able to move around normally or speak well enough to be understood. Now an experimental training program that uses printed symbols to convey meaning has begun to draw her out of her isolated world.

The Ontario Crippled Children's Centre in Toronto, where Kari is a pupil, is successfully using a system of symbols as a substitute for spoken language. They are patterned after "Blis-symbols," devised some 30 years ago by an Austrian-born chemical engineer named Charles Bliss in the hope that they would be used to promote international understanding. Hardly anyone paid any attention, though, until last year, when Shirley McNaughton, a teacher at the center, came upon an account of them in a library and decided that they might be modified for use by the handicapped.

Currently the center is using about 200 symbols arranged on wooden trays attached to wheelchairs. With demonstrations and explanations from their teachers, six brain-damaged youngsters are learning to use their fingers or a special clock hand fastened to the trays to point to the symbol that expresses what they want to say. Naturally there are symbols for such simple words as yes and no, hello and goodbye, man and woman. There is also a symbol for action that turns a noun into a verb. For example, a child who wants to say "Father sees mother" points first to the sign for father, the male symbol topped by the sign for roof or protection q. Next the child points to the eye symbol (R) and then to the action indicator qthus transforming the noun eye into the verb see. Finally, the youngster points to the sign for mother, combining the female and roof symbols q.

The sign for animal is q; for needs q, a slanting figure to suggest dependency; for food q , a mouth over the earth. All these can be put together to say "The animal needs food." To express emotions, a youngster can point to the sign for happy q or sad q .

The ability to communicate even such uncomplicated ideas as these has had remarkable effects. Less frustrated because they can finally express themselves, the youngsters become more relaxed and can thus make better use of whatever slight physical--and in a few cases even vocal--abilities they may have.

The children, most of whom seemed mentally retarded, are being stimulated to read and to demonstrate other intellectual skills. Perhaps most important, their previous apathy and withdrawal have been replaced by a new capacity to share in family life. The mother of one child at the center was "thrilled" when her son used symbols to say that he was angry about some things but that he loved his family. Kari's mother voiced surprise and delight when Kari managed to convey her sadness over the fact that her guinea pig cannot think.

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