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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."
You, however, are much more mature so I'm guessing some audio books on tape are a solution, also you can see if Berlitz still has their English series. Other language formats can help also, the library, or your local 'Adult' education courses down at the college _could_ have some ESL (English as a Second Language) courses available.
Speech Therapy is another route, I had _years_ of speech therapy when I was a child, and it did help. There's nothing 'childish' about it at all, if that's something you're afraid of, because these people are professionals. They'll help you on the 'recieving' end, and give you feedback whether you're forming your vowels and consonants correctly (To this day I still have a problem with 's' sometimes).
This part is a little off topic now. I'm going to be completely forward and ask, can you sign at all? American Sign Languge? Yes, No? Because you can use ASL as a foundation to sign while you talk, it _does_ actually help make the message clearer. You didn't mention in your post whether you signed or not. I'm not talking about learning pure ASL, I mean using simple ASL signs in English word order. If you wrote that post, then English is obviously your first language, I'm willing to bet. This is a stop gap measure should cochlear not be able to capture the remaining percentage of your projected hearing range.
If you want to talk more, you can throw me an e-mail at this address, truefluke at yahoo dot com (you know how to read that). I only offer this as a fellow stuck in a hearing world who has some idea of what you're going through.
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The cochlear implant relies on two components; the internal and the external components.
The internal component was surgically embedded into my head, behind my ear. The group of electrodes is inserted into my shell-like cochlea, to lie next to the cochlear nerve. I'll get to that in a moment.
The external component consists of a microphone and a speech processor. The speech processor is worn at the belt and the microphone is magnetically attached to my scalp, connected to the internal magnet inside my head.
The speech processor is responsible for translating analog sounds into digital pulses. The microphone captures the sounds and passes them down to the processor through a thin cord, usually worn under my shirt. The digital pulses travel back up the same cord to the microphone which then transmits, via low-powered radio frequency, the pulses through my skin. The pulses direct the electrodes to stimulate the cochlear nerve and in essence, mimic the process of hearing.
Now where did I put that
Other's have mentioned audio tapes/CDs, but I would think being able to read lips would be better for you?
-- Argel