Lombard noted in 1911 that a speaker changes his voice level similarly when the ambient noise level increases, on the one hand, and when the level at which he hears his own voice (his sidetone) decreases, on the other. We can now state the form of these two functions, show that they are related to each other and to the equal-sensation function for imitating speech or noise loudness, and account for their form in terms of the underlying sensory scales and the hypothesis that the speaker tries to maintain a speech-to-noise ratio favorable for communication.
Perturbations in the timing and spectrum of sidetone also lead the speaker to compensate for the apparent deterioration in his intelligibility. Such compensations reflect direct and indirect audience control of speech, rather than its autoregulation by sidetone. When not harassed by prying experimenters or an unfavorable acoustic environment, the speaker need no more listen to himself while speaking than he need speak to himself while listening.
This article is concerned with ethical aspects of the relations between language minorities using signed languages (called the Deaf-World) and the larger societies that engulf them. The article aims to show that such minorities have the properties of ethnic groups, and that an unsuitable construction of the Deaf-World as a disability group has led to programs of the majority that discourage Deaf children from acquiring the language and culture of the Deaf-World and that aim to reduce the number of Deaf births-programs that are unethical from an ethnic group perspective. Four reasons not to construe the Deaf-World as a disability group are advanced: Deaf people themselves do not believe they have a disability; the disability construction brings with it needless medical and surgical risks for the Deaf child; it also endangers the future of the Deaf-World; finally, the disability construction brings bad solutions to real problems because it is predicated on a misunderstanding.
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