The Story of My Life
were good for that first nature school, in which the teacher and pupil
played together, exploring together and educating themselves, pupil and
teacher inseparable.
Miss Keller's later education is easy to understand and needs no further
explanation than she has given. Those interested may get on application
to the Volta Bureau, Washington, D. C., the reports of the teachers who
prepared her for college, Mr. Arthur Gilman of the Cambridge School for
Young Ladies, and Mr. Merton S. Keith.
CHAPTER IV. SPEECH
The two persons who have written authoritatively about Miss Keller's
speech and the way she learned it are Miss Sarah Fuller, of the Horace
Mann School for the Deaf in Boston, Massachusetts, who gave her the
first lessons, and Miss Sullivan, who, by her unremitting discipline,
carried on the success of these first lessons.
Before I quote from Miss Sullivan's account, let me try to give some
impression of what Miss Keller's speech and voice qualities are at
present.
Her voice is low and pleasant to listen to. Her speech lacks variety and
modulation; it runs in a sing-song when she is reading aloud; and when
she speaks with fair degree of loudness, it hovers about two or three
middle tones. Her voice has an aspirate quality; there seems always to
be too much breath for the amount of tone. Some of her notes are musical
and charming. When she is telling a child's story, or one with pathos in
it, her voice runs into pretty slurs from one tone to another. This
is like the effect of the slow dwelling on long words, not quite well
managed, that one notices in a child who is telling a solemn story.
The principal thing that is lacking is sentence accent and variety
in the inflection of phrases. Miss Keller pronounces each word as
a foreigner does when he is still labouring with the elements of a
sentence, or as children sometimes read in school when they have to pick
out each word.
She speaks French and German. Her friend, Mr. John Hitz, whose native
tongue is German, says that her pronunciation is excellent. Another
friend, who is as familiar with French as with English, finds her French
much more intelligible than her English. When she speaks English she
distributes her emphasis as in French and so does not put sufficient
stress on accented syllables. She says for example, "pro-vo-ca-tion,"
"in-di-vi-du-al," with ever so little difference between the value of
syllables, and a good deal of inconsistency in the pronunciation of the
same word one day and the next. It would, I think, be hard to make her
feel just how to pronounce DICTIONARY without her erring either toward
DICTIONAYRY or DICTION'RY, and, of course the word is neither one nor
the other. For no system of marks in a lexicon can tell one how to
pronounce a word. The only way is to hear it, especially in a language
like English which is so full of unspellable, suppressed vowels and
quasi-vowels.
Miss Keller's vowels are not firm. Her AWFUL is nearly AWFIL. The
wavering is caused by the absence of accent on FUL, for she pronounces
FULL correctly.
She sometimes mispronounces as she reads aloud and comes on a word which
she happens never to have uttered, though she may have written it many
times. This difficulty and some others may be corrected when she and
Miss Sullivan have more time. Since 1894, they have been so much in
their books that they have neglected everything that was not necessary
to the immediate task of passing the school years successfully. Miss
Keller will never be able, I believe, to speak loud without destroying
the pleasant quality and the distinctness of her words, but she can do
much to make her speech clearer.
When she was at the Wright-Humason School in New York, Dr. Humason tried
to improve her voice, not only her word pronunciation, but the voice
itself, and gave her lessons in tone and vocal exercises.
It is hard to say whether or not Miss Keller's speech is easy to
understand. Some understand her readily; others do not. Her friends grow
accustomed to her speech and forget that it is different from that of
any one else. Children seldom have any difficulty in understanding
her; which suggests that her deliberate measured speech is like theirs,
before they come to the adult trick of running all the words of a phrase
into one movement of the breath. I am told that Miss Keller speaks
better than most other deaf people.
Miss Keller has told how she learned to speak. Miss Sullivan's account
in her address at Chautauqua, in July, 1894, at the meeting of The
American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, is
substantially like Miss Keller's in points of fact.
MISS SULLIVAN'S ACCOUNT OF MISS KELLER'S SPEECH
It was three years from the time when Helen began to communicate by
means of the manual alphabet that she received her first lesson in the
more natural and universal medium of human intercourse--oral language.
She had become very proficient in the use of the manual alphabet, which
was her only means of communication with the outside world; through it
she had acquired a vocabulary which enabled her to converse freely,
read intelligently, and write with comparative ease and correctness.
Nevertheless, the impulse to utter audible sounds was strong within
her, and the constant efforts which I made to repress this instinctive
tendency, which I feared in time would become unpleasant, were of no
avail. I made no effort to teach her to speak, because I regarded her
inability to watch the lips of others as an insurmountable obstacle.
But she gradually became conscious that her way of communicating was
different from that used by those around her, and one day her thoughts
found expression. "How do the blind girls know what to say with their
mouths? Why do you not teach me to talk like them? Do deaf children ever
learn to speak?" I explained to her that some deaf children were taught
to speak, but that they could see their teachers' mouths, and that that
was a very great assistance to them. But she interrupted me to say
she was very sure she could feel my mouth very well. Soon after this
conversation, a lady came to see her and told her about the deaf and
blind Norwegian child, Ragnhild Kaata, who had been taught to speak and
understand what her teacher said to her by touching his lips with her
fingers. She at once resolved to learn to speak, and from that day to
this she has never wavered in that resolution. She began immediately
to make sounds which she called speaking, and I saw the necessity of
correct instruction, since her heart was set upon learning to talk; and,
feeling my own incompetence to teach her, never having given the subject
of articulation serious study, I went with my pupil for advice and
assistance, to Miss Sarah Fuller. Miss Fuller was delighted with Helen's
earnestness and enthusiasm, and at once began to teach her. In a few
lessons she learned nearly all of the English sounds, and in less than a
month she was able to articulate a great many words distinctly. From
the first she was not content to be drilled in single sounds, but was
impatient to pronounce words and sentences. The length of the word
or the difficulty of the arrangement of the elements never seemed to
discourage her. But, with all her eagerness and intelligence, learning
to speak taxed her powers to the utmost. But there was satisfaction
in seeing from day to day the evidence of growing mastery and the
possibility of final success. And Helen's success has been more complete
and inspiring than any of her friends expected, and the child's delight
in being able to utter her thoughts in living and distinct speech is
shared by all who witness her pleasure when strangers tell her that they
understand her.
I have been asked a great many times whether I think Helen will ever
speak naturally; that is, as other people speak. I am hardly prepared
to decide that question, or even give an opinion regarding it. I believe
that I have hardly begun yet to know what is possible. Teachers of the
deaf often express surprise that Helen's speech is so good when she
has not received any regular instruction in speech since the first few
lessons given her by Miss Fuller. I can only say in reply, "This is
due to habitual imitation and practice! practice! practice!" Nature has
determined how the child shall learn to speak, and all we can do is to
aid him in the simplest, easiest way possible, by encouraging him to
observe and imitate the vibrations in the voice.
Some further details appear in an earlier, more detailed account, which
Miss Sullivan wrote for the Perkins Institution Report of 1891.
I knew that Laura Bridgman had shown the same intuitive desire to
produce sounds, and had even learned to pronounce a few simple words,
which she took great delight in using, and I did not doubt that Helen
could accomplish as much as this. I thought, however, that the advantage
she would derive would not repay her for the time and labour that such
an experiment would cost.
Moreover, the absence of hearing renders the voice monotonous and often
very disagreeable; and such speech is generally unintelligible except to
those familiar with the speaker.
The acquiring of speech by untaught deaf children is always slow and
often painful. Too much stress, it seems to me, is often laid upon the
importance of teaching a deaf child to articulate--a process which may
be detrimental to the pupil's intellectual development. In the very
nature of things, articulation is an unsatisfactory means of education;
while the use of the manual alphabet quickens and invigorates mental
activity, since through it the deaf child is brought into close contact
with the English language, and the highest and most abstract ideas may
be conveyed to the mind readily and accurately. Helen's case proved it
to be also an invaluable aid in acquiring articulation. She was already
perfectly familiar with words and the construction of sentences, and
had only mechanical difficulties to overcome. Moreover, she knew what a
pleasure speech would be to her, and this definite knowledge of what
she was striving for gave her the delight of anticipation which made
drudgery easy. The untaught deaf child who is made to articulate does
not know what the goal is, and his lessons in speech are for a long time
tedious and meaningless.
Before describing the process of teaching Helen to speak, it may be well
to state briefly to what extent she had used the vocal organs before
she began to receive regular instruction in articulation. When she was
stricken down with the illness which resulted in her loss of sight and
hearing, at the age of nineteen months, she was learning to talk. The
unmeaning babblings of the infant were becoming day by day conscious and
voluntary signs of what she felt and thought. But the disease checked
her progress in the acquisition of oral language, and, when her
physical strength returned, it was found that she had ceased to speak
intelligibly because she could no longer hear a sound. She continued
to exercise her vocal organs mechanically, as ordinary children do. Her
cries and laughter and the tones of her voice as she pronounced many
word elements were perfectly natural, but the child evidently attached
no significance to them, and with one exception they were produced not
with any intention of communicating with those around her, but from
the sheer necessity of exercising her innate, organic, and hereditary
faculty of expression. She always attached a meaning to the word water,
which was one of the first sounds her baby lips learned to form, and it
was the only word which she continued to articulate after she lost her
hearing. Her pronunciation of this gradually became indistinct, and
when I first knew her it was nothing more than a peculiar noise.