Flickering at Babel

Flickering at Babel: Language Deprivation, Sensory Disconnection, and the Silent Struggle to Belong

By Dr. Rae Stout

Imagine being surrounded by people who all speak the same language—but you hear it like static, or through water, or from behind a wall. Imagine living in a world where words come fast and blurred, like clouds instead of bricks, never stacking solidly enough to build the structure of thought.

This is what language deprivation can feel like. Not only for children who are Deaf or hard of hearing, but for the far greater number of children with fluctuating, minimal, or mild hearing loss, or those with auditory processing disorder (APD)—a form of central or brain-based hearing loss that often goes undetected by routine screening. These children can hear—but not always with clarity, not always in context, and not always in time.

In ancient mythology, the Tower of Babel was humanity’s attempt to reach the heavens—a shared project built on shared language. When language fractured, the tower crumbled. People scattered, no longer able to coordinate or connect. Of course, in the biblical story, God didn’t want the tower to reach the heavens. The scattering of language was an intentional act to humble humanity. But in this metaphor, we’re not invoking divine punishment—we’re invoking the idea of humanity striving toward a singular understanding. The desire to reach something higher together: shared knowledge, shared meaning, shared connection.

Because real truth isn’t built from uniformity. It comes from perspective—from many voices in conversation. Like a grand rounds of surgeons consulting on a complex case, the path to wisdom requires dialogue across difference. We reach toward truth not by all speaking the same, but by truly understanding one another.

But children with auditory deprivation—whether due to peripheral hearing loss or central processing differences—are not fully in that conversation. They are only sometimes part of it. Flickering in and out of our shared reality like a faulty lightbulb. A radio station just slightly off-frequency. A wire that loses its connection without warning.

They catch glimpses.
They hear fragments.
They feel the shape of the conversation—but cannot live fully inside it.

And that unpredictability brings anxiety. They may understand one sentence, then miss the next. Laugh with their peers one moment, then sit in silence the next, confused and disconnected. They’re almost fluent in our language, but never secure. Never settled. Never safe enough in the signal to let down their guard and grow.

Fluctuating hearing loss, often caused by conditions like otitis media (ear infections), distorts access to consistent sound. Minimal and mild hearing loss—which many schools still dismiss as “insignificant”—reduces auditory detail at precisely the level where critical phonological information lives. And APD? It represents a different type of hearing loss entirely—not in the ears, but in the brain.

While peripheral hearing loss affects the outer, middle, or inner ear and auditory nerve, central hearing loss involves the brain’s ability to interpret and make sense of sound. Children with APD often pass hearing tests because their ears work fine—but the brain’s processing system cannot organize and decode the sounds fast enough or clearly enough to extract meaning, especially in noise or complex environments. This is why APD must be understood as central hearing loss, deserving of just as much attention and support as more traditional hearing loss.

When a child can’t decode language fluently, the problem doesn’t stop at speech. It spirals: into reading difficulties, poor working memory, lagging executive function, and shallow vocabulary. Higher-order thinking requires precise, timely, layered access to language. Without it, even a gifted child’s mind may begin to organize information in fractured, inefficient ways—like trying to construct a cathedral with no blueprint and missing half the bricks.

These children may appear inattentive, rigid, anxious, or “on the spectrum,” not because they lack empathy or social curiosity—but because they cannot reliably share or follow the spoken code. Their internal language tower has no foundation. Without early intervention, they are forced to build scaffolding alone, compensating with visual cues, memorization, or withdrawal. And that comes at a cost.

The cost is isolation.

A child who cannot join fast-paced social talk, classroom discussion, or nuanced adult conversation is not just missing words. They are missing belonging. They are cut off from the cultural and emotional glue that binds us together. The joke that makes everyone laugh but confuses them. The instructions they misunderstood again. The feeling of always being a step behind, even when they’re trying as hard as they can.

Typical children may sometimes step outside the conversation—by choice, by temperament, or by cultural context. But children with hearing loss—whether peripheral or central—are not just separated by choice. They are separated by disability. The wall between them and the world is invisible, but real. It blocks their access not only to social exchange, but to language itself—the gateway to knowledge, reasoning, literature, and connection.

They are not just missing formal instruction. They are missing life’s informal curriculum.
They are cut off from television, from classroom chatter, from overheard phone calls, and from car rides where siblings laugh or parents make plans up front. They are missing the ordinary background noise of childhood where so much language is absorbed—not taught, but soaked in. Eavesdropping, whispering, arguing, joking—these are the invisible bridges to belonging. And when the signal is blurred or broken, children cannot cross.

And to make matters worse, many children and adults who do undergo auditory processing testing are not given a fair shake.

Their lived experiences—the fatigue, the confusion, the overwhelming effort it takes to follow conversations—are too often dismissed in favor of a narrow, quantitative lens. They’re judged solely on standardized scores, measured under ideal conditions: one-on-one, in a quiet room, on a good day. And because the tests themselves aren’t fully sensitive—especially for subtle, fluctuating, or fatigue-based processing differences—these individuals are frequently told their auditory system is “within normal limits.”

But their problem is in their head. It’s in their brain. That doesn’t make it psychological. That makes it neurological.

I’m not saying the tests are useless. I’m not saying every person who passes them actually has an auditory disorder. But what I am saying—what I’ve seen over and over again—is that we can’t pretend a few numbers on a score sheet tell the full story.

We have to look at how the tests interact with each other. We have to listen to the case history, to the family observations, to the patterns of school struggles and social withdrawal. We have to be clinicians—not technicians.

If a surgeon finds a mass and only biopsies one part—say the outer layer—and that piece happens to be benign, they could wrongly declare the whole tumor harmless. Meanwhile, the patient’s pain, fatigue, and functional decline tell a different story. They’re dismissed not because there’s no evidence, but because the wrong piece was tested.

That’s exactly what we’re doing with auditory processing. We’re ignoring the child’s difficulty with fast speech, with noisy classrooms, with remembering oral instructions—and instead giving a stamp of “normal” based on a sliver of idealized, structured input. We’re mistaking the absence of measurable failure in one test setting for the absence of a real-life problem.

And that mistake has consequences. When we fail to take a holistic, layered view of auditory difficulties, we misdiagnose. We misplace blame. We lose trust. And worst of all, we leave children unsupported—struggling in silence, told they’re lazy or inattentive, when in reality they’re doing the best they can with a scrambled signal.

And for the few among them who do manage to reach fluency—who grow up to speak, to read, to connect—it is not without cost.
It is through great effort, through invisible fatigue, through hours of therapy, trial and error, and internal strain. They have climbed Babel with a broken map and a fading signal, and still found a way to stand beside us. But they are tired. And too often, their effort is unseen.

None of us who have not grown up with these difficulties will ever fully understand what it took for them to stay connected.
To make sense of a world that made no sense to them.
To pretend they were “fine” when they were just surviving.
To do with effort what others do with ease—and still be told they are not trying hard enough.

We owe them more than acknowledgment. We owe them access. We owe them understanding.

Because such a “Tower of Babel” will never rise unless we build it together—and no one should be left flickering in and out of the conversation that shapes our collective future.

References

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Hall, W. C. (2017). What you don’t know can hurt you: The risk of language deprivation by impairing sign language development in deaf children. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 21(5), 961–965.

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