Auditory Training for Long-Term Deafness?

AnDarkon asks: "I've recieved a cochlear implant about a year ago and I'm looking for material with which to train my hearing after 33 years of deafness. The material I'm interested in would help develop my speech recognition abilities. My hearing is already 100% at 30 decibels. It's the understanding speech part that is taking more time. I've looked high and low online and offline for literature that would provide information where I could train myself, on my own or with a hearing partner, to recognize general speech. There are some adult literature, but they're generally directed towards adults who have hearing experience and only recently lost their hearing. After 33 years, I'm pretty much starting from scratch, very new to hearing, more than a newborn baby (the baby starts hearing while in the womb.) I've found some aids such as text-to-speech readers and Microsoft Agents very helpful. Any advice my way would greatly benefit and, hopefully, for other cochlear implant users with similar experiences like me."

Comments

Book suggestion

[z0ot]

The book 'The Language Instinct' by Steven Pinker may provide some assistance. It offers insight into how the brain perceives and develops language ability. While it doesn't contain explicit techniques for improving speech recognition, perhaps it will give you some ideas on how to develop your own exercises for training your hearing.

Re:Venue

[AnDarkon]

I should have mentioned it in the article; I did, in fact, ask the professionals before turning to the slashdot crowd. Most of their implant users fit in several categories:

1. children born deaf or lost their hearing soon after birth (within 6 years)
2. Adults who were able to use hearing aids until their hearing progessed to the point where HAs no longer worked. They have a basis on which to train themselves on hearing with a cochlear implant.

Since my background, as a profoundly deaf man, statistically would have put me right into the Deaf (notice the capital `D') community, and then I wouldn't even preceive a need for an implant. However, since I'm a fluke to the statisticians, I grew up completely in the hearing world; hearing parents, hearing siblings, and so on.

But I digress; the professionals were at a loss on how to advise a deaf man who's never, nor could, remembered hearing per se. So here I am.