What Stephane Dion hears

Posted by cwaddell under Election 2008, Election 2008 Student articles

Amanda Truscott

Stéphane Dion’s trouble with English is not the result of a hearing problem, according to a prominent Toronto audiologist – though some other experts are not so sure.

 

Dr. Marshall Chasin, the director of auditory research for the Musicians’ Clinics of Canada, says Dion’s speech has all the sounds and intonation patterns it would be missing if hearing loss had prevented him from learning the language properly. 

 

“Intonation is carried on the nasals, on the vowels, on the ‘L’ and the ‘R’— what we call sonorants in linguistics— and if he had a deficit for that, his speech would be missing those sounds as well, or they wouldn’t be well-articulated. But the nasals in English and in French are fine,” he  says.

Dion’s difficulties in expressing himself clearly in English have been cited by critics, and some in the media, as an obstacle to connecting with English-speaking voters.
At a campaign stop last week in Saint-Lambert, Que., Dion told reporters that he had trouble hearing different English intonations and isolating sounds in the presence of background noise.

 

“If I am in a cocktail and everybody is speaking at the same time I will have difficulty and it may affect my ability then to catch the music of the beautiful language of English,” he said.

 

He has been diagnosed with a hearing condition, he said, but he couldn’t remember what it was called.

 

It’s certainly plausible that Dion does have trouble hearing, Chasin says. Everyone begins to lose some hearing after the age of 40, and Dion is 53. He may even have some other, less common hearing problem.

 

Imperfections in his English, however, are more likely a result of the age at which he learned it, Chasin says.

 

“The only time that you will really acquire a new language without an accent is if you acquire it before the age of puberty, age 10 or 12.”

 

In contrast, Dr. Chantal Kealey, the director of audiology for the Canadian Association of Speech Language Pathologists and Audiologists, says Dion was too vague about his condition for it to be possible to make a specific diagnosis, but she didn’t rule out the possibility that it could be something that might affect his ability to learn a language.

 

“If you have a hearing loss, you certainly are at a disadvantage if you’re trying to learn a second language, because one of the ways to learn a second language is by hearing it,” she says.

 

Regardless of the reasons for the state of Dion’s English, Chasin says the media have been unfair in criticizing his grasp of the language. “I can certainly understand Mr. Dion’s speech quite well,” he says.

 

“He has French as his first language, and I don’t think that this is any reflection on how good a leader he would be, or how good a representative in the House of Commons he would be for his constituency, so I think the media is stupid for concentrating on a second language issue. It’s a form of covert discrimination, or even racism against people that speak French as their first language.”

Jean Chretien won three elections as Liberal leader despite his own strong French accent and sometimes mangled syntax in English. Yet Canadians have also had experience with several leaders, including Pierre Trudeau, Brian Mulroney and Paul Martin who were almost equally fluent in the two official languages.

Dr. John Esling, head of the linguistics department at the University of Victoria, says people should be more concerned with the content of what’s being said than with how it sounds. He also commends Dion’s improvement.

 

“Over the time that he’s been leader of his party, it sounds like he’s changed and developed his repertoire in English quite a great deal, and also what I would call his spoken fluency, as opposed to talking about pronunciation.”

 

The rhythm and intonation of French and English are quite different from one another, he says. “So, is it a difficult task to pick up on the rhythm and get it right, or even to hear it right? Yeah, it is a bit of a difficult task, but it doesn’t mean that somebody can’t have an incredibly strong accent and still use words that make a point.”

 

Esling says it’s possible a candidate’s abilities as an orator are important to voters, but he thinks Canadians are discerning enough to look beyond the grace with which a speech is delivered.

 

In any case, he says, “It doesn’t seem to me that any of the Canadian party leaders are outstanding rhetorical speakers.”

 

He adds, “I don’t know how to make the connection between how people sound, and how you know what they’re going to do.”

Amanda Truscott is a student in the Master of journalism program at the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University.