by GAVIN FRANCIS
Deaf-mute children learning to hear through their vibratory senses at a school in Zurich, 1955 PHOTO/René Burri/Magnum Photos
I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey Through the Science of Sound and Language by Lydia Denworth (Dutton, 390 pp., $26.95)
Experts in language acquisition say that the first three years of a child’s life are the most crucial in developing the conceptual frame to build fluent language. By the time Miss Black began to learn language (and Sign language is as delicate, sensitive, and complete a means of expression as any spoken language) that critical period was past. She didn’t say as much, but she’d been living with the consequences of that delay ever since. It was there in her lack of involvement with the hearing world, in her inability to find satisfying work, in the clumsy handwriting with which she communicated.
In I Can Hear You Whisper Lydia Denworth makes what she calls “an intimate journey through the science of sound and language.” That critical window of language acquisition, so detrimental to Miss Black, was of immense significance to Denworth: when her son was about a year old she learned that he was very hard of hearing and might soon be deaf. She had noticed something was amiss because the development of his language was much slower than it had been for her other two sons.
The New York Review of Books for more