ASSOCIATION OF THE COMMUNITY POPE JOHN XXIII

Deafness

Deafness is the inability to use the sense of hearing due to a loss of partial hearing (hearing loss) or total hearing loss (cofosis) and unilateral or bilateral hearing loss. Thus a deaf person is unable or hear. This may be an inherited trait or may result from disease, trauma, long-term exposure to noise, or aggressive medicines that hurt the auditory nerve.
So far you can distinguish two types of hearing loss

Sensory Hearing Loss

Cases in which hair cells of the inner ear or the nerves supplying it are damaged. This hearing loss can range from mild to profound losses. It often affects an individual's ability to hear certain frequencies more than others, so that they hear sounds distorted but the use of a headset amplifier can regulate that. At present the great technological benefits of digital hearing aids are able to amplify only the frequencies of a deficient inversely distorted wave for the deaf person to perceive the sound as similar as possible as a hearing person would.

Mixed hearing loss

They refer to cases of conductive and sensory loss, so there are problems both in the outer or middle ear and the inner. This type of loss can also result from damage of the heart of the central nervous system, either on the tracks to the brain or the brain itself.

Social consequences

If deafness is especially acute it can greatly affect the way the deaf person is related to its human environment. A serious limitation in their ability to find a way of communication by the ear canal, ie the spoken language is the consequence. However, the way they understand the consequences of this failure can vary considerably so that there are two fundamental perspectives on how to understand deafness.

Pedagogical Definition of Deafness

Deafness can be divided into two types: the pre-lingual and post-lingual, depending on whether they occurred before or after acquiring the abstract conception of oral language in the brain structures (usually around 3 years of age). However, people who are deaf from an early age naturally express themselves with a sign language (LINK ALLA PAGINA DEI SEGNI LINGUA), the disappearance of the ear canal as a means of human communication leaving only the visual channel available.
The pre-lingual deafness is less common, and understanding of syntactic structures of spoken language affects the difficulty of their pronunciation. For the correct understanding of different shapes of prose or verse in oral language such as irony, especially those who are captured by a modulation of the voice tone, they are unable to understand. However, the vast majority of these problems can be overcome with a bilingual education (native language spoken and signed) from an early age.
The most common is post-lingual deafness and problems are similar in pre-lingual deafness. With the difference that the person has already acquired the abstract conception of oral language but, depending on age, tends to dominate the use of sign language.

Social anthropology of deafness

Recent studies (from the work of William Stokoe in 1960) proposed to address the deafness from an anthropological viewpoint. A group of deaf people who communicate among themselves through a sign language can be considered a minority language community, with a distinctive culture. The literature often makes the distinction between Deaf with a capital letter to refer to the anthropological and clinically defined deafness.
Depending on the case a deaf person can usually develop an idiosyncrasy with people who communicate through the visual channel, ie with sign language (SL).
It is considered as a community with distinct cultural and social conditions, a Deaf Community. The social link between the deaf signers is usually very strong due mainly to social isolation caused by the low awareness of their common problems or lifestyle and poor social relationships because they cannot hear spoken language.
In fact this group defines themselves as deaf signers and generally classify their social environment among listeners (which may be some signers who can hear) and to the rest of deaf people who, depending on the country may also be part of the Deaf Community. Among the Deaf also deaf signers differ from deaf Oralists, ie those who do not habitually use sign language or use a bimodal communication (lexicon of sign language with grammatical structure of a language spoken). Finally, the deaf can be implemented, ie have a cochlear implant instead of a headset so they can be signers or oralists.
Deaf Oralists, ie those deaf people who have received intensive rehabilitation of oral language in its infancy and not using a sign language as a lingua franca (usually as a result of prohibition by teachers) tend to adopt an attitude of respect to their social invisibility, sometimes do not even recognize it as such (using other definitions as hearing impaired, half listener, etc ...). This group is also often associated as people who are deaf signers especially those who cannot properly speak a spoken language in the grammatical aspect.
This last definition of deaf-mutism moreover is considered pejorative by the deaf signers believing in "talk" (visual channel in sign language). They consider high illiteracy of spoken language among deaf people has no connection with the dumbness, but a failure of the oral method in the education system in their childhood and youth. In fact, to call a person "deaf" to a non hearing person who does not to speak spoken language correctly is just like calling a person who cannot spell correctly "crippled", or "blind and crippled" for the lack of reading and writing. As well the "deaf mutism" would apply only to those who suffer from deafness and also are unable to generate human sounds by the absence or damage of the vocal cord. They are mutually independent aspects.

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