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

Re:Questions

[AnDarkon]

1. Yes, I read lips at 85% comprehension. The other 15% is blamed on English and its similar-looking words. Try saying `big' and `pig' in front of the mirror and you'll see what I mean.
   
2. Too soon to tell. I rely on experience to infer where the sound is coming from. If I hear something I couldn't identify and I don't immediately see anything that could be causing the sound, I look behind me.
   
3. Yes. Music isn't `sound' to me; whenever I feel elated, uplifted, that's music. Sound, on the other hand, sound like, pardon the pun, sounds to me.
   
4. I wear the implant all day long and take it off at bedtime. It's way too uncomfortable to sleep with the speech processor on my belt. It doesn't hurt. There are high-pitched sounds that would hurt if I listened to them too long.
   

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.