SPEECH AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Mini Assignments
Name: Thiiban Raaj A/L Suresh Kumar
IC Number: 010604140979

2. Week 3 (10 marks). DUE: 6 OCT 2021

Cover your ears with earplugs or earphones or headphones for one hour. Compare your
experience with and without your ears covered. Write down your observations and
experience in two situations: while alone and while interacting with your family.

A.While alone:

When I was wearing my headphones whilst being alone, I realised that I can't really do many
of the things I normally would do in my day to day basis. As a sociable person, I tend to
interact a lot with my peers but with the headphones one, I realised that I could not do that
anymore. Despite that, wearing these headphones really helped me to get away from reality.
For example, during the one hour time period,I was reading a book. While I was not able to
hear anything,I realised that I was able to imagine the situation in the book much clearer. It's
as if my sense of imagination increased while losing my sense of hearing. Besides that,
another activity that I tried while covering my ears is watching a Netflix show . Since I could
not hear what was going on, I had to turn on the closed captioning for the show. What I
realised was that I was more focused on three subtitles than the actual show which made
me miss certain part of the show. After the hour was up, I decided to do the same activities
again but without my headphones to see the differences. Well, for one I could call and talk to
my friends and have normal conversations. When I got to the reading part,I realised that the
commotion outside my room, the random noises from outside the window was actually
hindering my reading time. I noticed a drastic change in my sense of imagination while not
wearing the headphones. Once again, I tried watching the Netflix show normally without
wearing the headphones. This time, there was no need for me to turn on any closed
captioning and I didn't have to focus as much as I had to when I was watching with the
headphones on.

While interacting with peers.

As my family members are rarely home, I have decided to do this experiment with my peers
via online video calls. Ok,so for the first hour, I tried interacting with my friends online while
wearing the headphones. Well, obviously it was extremely hard as I could not hear anything
that they were saying. I realised while wearing the headphones, my gaze often moved
towards the mouth of the speaker to at least get some idea of what they are saying through
lip reading. When that didn't work, I tried to look at my friend's hand moment and body
language to try to figure out what they were saying. While wearing the headphones, my
entire attention was just on my friends and nothing else. My ability to multitask had vanished
completely. This whole charade went on for an hour and I couldn't understand most of the
things that my peers talked about. After that, I took out my headphones. Instantly I felt a
sense of relief that I could hear again and it was so much easier to interact and socialise with
my friends. When I could hear, I found myself able to do other things and not just focus on
my friends. Entirely, this whole experiment gave me a whole new found respect for people
who can't hear.