Acoustic Characteristics of the Speech of Young Cochlear Implant Users

[jillio]

That's one of the best post I've read from you, vallee. I agree with everything you stated. besides not all parents can tell that the child is happy with what processing he/she is doing in school. I never told my dad that oral method wasn't working for me 100 percent nor did I ever knew there was ever a different approach that could work better for me.

I agree....that is one of the best posts I have read from vallee. It seems we are not so far apart in thinking as it was portrayed.

I also agree with you, Cheri, in that parents have to know and be open to all of the methods. Not knowing that there is a different approach that can benefit the child, or being told that a different approach should not be used, is exactly what we are all advocating against.

 

[jillio]

I agree with a lot of your post, Vallee

But I respectfully disagree about "the best form of research is only 5 years old, not more than 7". Research done 100s of years ago about gravity is good today. Miller's apparatus from 1950s in Biology still gives scientists ideas about the origin of life. And probably some research 2 years ago about stem cell research now is too old.

But bias is a big issue. I am suspicious about research from a company with a financial interest. Yes, maybe the research is valid but maybe not. I have a problem with some CI research because of this - the articles seem limited to show more positives than negatives sometimes.

I first talked about research because you ask about if your view counts for something. To me, people's experience counts, but less than most research. I would not accept a study with one subject and no limits - and this is like one person's experience. When I have a difficult decision I try to look at research for basic understanding. People's experience is more emotional - "this hurt", "I felt great", "I was confused" etc. And is more interesting usually (sometimes not ).

Also I want to know history. Research in science tells you about today, but history matters to me. For example, if you don't know that in the past schools for the deaf prohibited ASL and forced oral, and Alexander Graham Bell thought deaf are a "defective race" and promoted oral, then probably you don't understand a lot of deaf/HoH people's view of oral or parents etc who don't learn ASL for deaf kids.

So a balance I guess, with suspicion about everything without being paranoid. :P

Good posting, Kaitlin. And I agree with you that we must keep an historical perspective in order to evaluate and compare recent research findings with older research findings. And one should always be aware of possible bias (we've discussed this before). Keeping an historical perspective allows us to see consistency in finding despite differences in technology. For instance, research has consistently shown that children exposed to both sign and speech develop greater literacy skills and have higher academic achievement that children exposed to speech only. These findings, from an historical standpoint, have been consistent whether the child is using a hearing aid or a cochlear implant. So, while the implant may, from a recent research standpoint, indicate greater speech perception, that increase in speech perception does not correlate with an increase in acheivement academically unless combined with a signing environment. So, the conclusion is that, yes, the CI has improved speech perception, but the increase is not sufficient to overcome academic difficulties. Historically, the best solution has been, and continues to be speech and sign.

 

[Tousi]

Yup, good posts; history often teaches us what we should do tomorrow.

 

[deafdyke]

jillo thank you!
Cloggy, you are just so enthralled by the fact that your daughter's picking up SOME access to the hearing world, that you're ignoring the fact that she does not have 100% access to the hearing world. Even a kid with unilateral hearing loss (who is mostly "pretty much hearing") isn't 100% a part of the hearing world.
My parents could have written your posts. God, many "oral sucess" parents of dhh folks who post here could have written your posts twenty or even thirty or even forty or fifty or even SIXTY years ago. Your daughter's experiance is NOT new. There have ALWAYS been kids who have done well oral only, or done well in picking up oral language with HAs or CIs. I actually was one of them. Heck.....my English language skills have always tested as high even compared to hearing kids.
Even my parents now say that they should have exposed me to a full toolbox, instead of being audist and only exposing me to speech speech and more speech.
Tell me. How would you feel if you'd grown up with both a learning strengh and a learning weakness, and everything in your life was focused on that weakness? That's what oral only does to most dhh kids...........concentrates exclusively on a weakness!
I don't think you know how limiting and frustrating oral only can be. Even kids who do well orally, very often have significent social issues,(simalir to those with Asperger's Syndrome) or say that they feel like they don't totally fit into the hearing world. You are only a parent............and you're only a parent of a kid who has aquirred SOME speech. Wait a few years and then I think you'll reevaluate your opinon of my experiance. Sure, some kids do well, but there have ALWAYS been kids who do well. That doesn't mean that the MAJORITY will do well!

 

[shel90]

Good posting, Kaitlin. And I agree with you that we must keep an historical perspective in order to evaluate and compare recent research findings with older research findings. And one should always be aware of possible bias (we've discussed this before). Keeping an historical perspective allows us to see consistency in finding despite differences in technology. For instance, research has consistently shown that children exposed to both sign and speech develop greater literacy skills and have higher academic achievement that children exposed to speech only. These findings, from an historical standpoint, have been consistent whether the child is using a hearing aid or a cochlear implant. So, while the implant may, from a recent research standpoint, indicate greater speech perception, that increase in speech perception does not correlate with an increase in acheivement academically unless combined with a signing environment. So, the conclusion is that, yes, the CI has improved speech perception, but the increase is not sufficient to overcome academic difficulties. Historically, the best solution has been, and continues to be speech and sign.

I keep seeing that proven to me by my students who use both speech and sign. I dont understand why forbidding ASL in the educational setting is so desired when research has shown proof that learning becomes easier for the DHH children. Why make learning more difficult for these children than necessary? Why put a child in an environment that doesnt provide a full and equal access to language like hearing children get?

 

[shel90]

But Rick - do you agree that 1) lipreading is very hard, tiring, and takes time away from learning class information 2) terps fail to show up, is late, or not competent is not usual and can be fixed (replacement) and 3) ASL benefits the deaf/HoH kid?

Lipreading is very hard

From Center for Hearing Loss Help: Speachreading (lip-reading)

English is not a particularly easy language to speechread. Some languages are much easier (and some are even harder). The best estimates are that 30% to 35% of English sounds can be speechread. In order for a sound to be easily speechread, it must be formed on the lips and/or in the front of the mouth.

Unfortunately for us, we form many English sounds in the middle of our mouths. Others come from the back of our mouths and even in our throats. These latter are absolutely impossible to speechread.

As a result, a perfect speechreader only would be able to speechread about one third of what is said. They guess at the rest, taking into consideration their understanding of the spoken language, the body language of the speaker and the subject under discussion. Some people are remarkably good at guessing but no one is perfect.

Lipreading is tiring

From Center for Hearing Loss Help: Speachreading (lip-reading)

From A downside of speechreading, and one that is not obvious, is that it is very tiring, especially with someone who is hard to speechread in the first place. Fatigue is the constant companion of most hard of hearing people whether they realise it or not. Speechreading takes enormous concentration. We have to work very hard to understand what is being said. We must follow every lip movement, every facial expression, every gesture, to try to find meaning in what you are saying. We cannot relax our eyes for even a moment and have a nice easy conversation like people with normal hearing can.

Speechreading is not merely a matter of just watching speech movements, but includes considerable mental effort in making sense from an incompletely perceived message. In fact, I’ve heard our brains have to work five times as hard to understand speech as do those of people with normal hearing. In the course of a day, our brains have done as much mental gymnastics as a person with normal hearing does in a whole week! No wonder we get tired so fast!

Lipreading takes time away from learning class information

From Center for Hearing Loss Help: Speachreading (lip-reading)

Another downside of speechreading is that we spend so much of our time just trying to understand the words the person is saying that we can easily miss the meaning they are trying to communicate.

ASL benefits deaf/HoH kids

From Topics in Language Disorders, v18 n4 p47-60 Aug 1998: ASL Proficiency and English Literacy within a Bilingual Deaf Education Model of Instruction

Examines the theoretical models and arguments in the debate concerning possible relationships between natural sign language proficiency and English literacy. It presents findings of a study with 155 school-aged deaf children that supported such a connection.

---

From Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 2:1 1997: A Study of the Relationship Between American Sign Language and English Literacy

This article presents the findings of a study of the relationship between American Sign Language (ASL) skills and English literacy among 160 deaf children. Using a specially designed test of ASL to determine three levels of ASL ability, we found that deaf children who attained the higher two levels significantly outperformed children in the lowest ASL ability level in English literacy, regardless of age and IQ. Furthermore, although deaf children with deaf mothers outperformed deaf children of hearing mothers in both ASL and English literacy, when ASL level was held constant, there was no difference between these two groups, except in the lowest level of ASL ability. The implication of this research is straightforward and powerful: Deaf children's learning of English appears to benefit from the acquisition of even a moderate fluency in ASL.

---

From J Deaf Stud Deaf Educ. 1997 Summer;2(3):150-60: Modality of language shapes working memory: evidence from digit span and spatial span in ASL signers.

Deaf children who are native users of American Sign Language (ASL) and hearing children who are native English speakers performed three working memory tasks. Results indicate that language modality shapes the architecture of working memory. Digit span with forward and backward report, performed by each group in their native language, suggests that the language rehearsal mechanisms for spoken language and for sign language differ in their processing constraints. Unlike hearing children, deaf children who are native signers of ASL were as good at backward recall of digits as at forward recall, suggesting that serial order information for ASL is stored in a form that does not have a preferred directionality. Data from a group of deaf children who were not native signers of ASL rule out explanations in terms of a floor effect or a nonlinguistic visual strategy. Further, deaf children who were native signers outperformed hearing children on a nonlinguistic spatial memory task, suggesting that language expertise in a particular modality exerts an influence on nonlinguistic working memory within that modality. Thus, language modality has consequences for the structure of working memory, both within and outside the linguistic domain.

Everything that u just posted is very much true about my educational upbringing in a strictly oral-only environment. That is why I am against it. Why make learning difficult for the children causing them to lose motivation for learning? That is what I will never understand no matter how many times I am told how good oral programs are.

 

[jillio]

jillo thank you!
Cloggy, you are just so enthralled by the fact that your daughter's picking up SOME access to the hearing world, that you're ignoring the fact that she does not have 100% access to the hearing world. Even a kid with unilateral hearing loss (who is mostly "pretty much hearing") isn't 100% a part of the hearing world.
My parents could have written your posts. God, many "oral sucess" parents of dhh folks who post here could have written your posts twenty or even thirty or even forty or fifty or even SIXTY years ago. Your daughter's experiance is NOT new. There have ALWAYS been kids who have done well oral only, or done well in picking up oral language with HAs or CIs. I actually was one of them. Heck.....my English language skills have always tested as high even compared to hearing kids.
Even my parents now say that they should have exposed me to a full toolbox, instead of being audist and only exposing me to speech speech and more speech.
Tell me. How would you feel if you'd grown up with both a learning strengh and a learning weakness, and everything in your life was focused on that weakness? That's what oral only does to most dhh kids...........concentrates exclusively on a weakness!
I don't think you know how limiting and frustrating oral only can be. Even kids who do well orally, very often have significent social issues,(simalir to those with Asperger's Syndrome) or say that they feel like they don't totally fit into the hearing world. You are only a parent............and you're only a parent of a kid who has aquirred SOME speech. Wait a few years and then I think you'll reevaluate your opinon of my experiance. Sure, some kids do well, but there have ALWAYS been kids who do well. That doesn't mean that the MAJORITY will do well!

YW, dd. And btw, good post!

 

[shel90]

jillo thank you!
Cloggy, you are just so enthralled by the fact that your daughter's picking up SOME access to the hearing world, that you're ignoring the fact that she does not have 100% access to the hearing world. Even a kid with unilateral hearing loss (who is mostly "pretty much hearing") isn't 100% a part of the hearing world.
My parents could have written your posts. God, many "oral sucess" parents of dhh folks who post here could have written your posts twenty or even thirty or even forty or fifty or even SIXTY years ago. Your daughter's experiance is NOT new. There have ALWAYS been kids who have done well oral only, or done well in picking up oral language with HAs or CIs. I actually was one of them. Heck.....my English language skills have always tested as high even compared to hearing kids.
Even my parents now say that they should have exposed me to a full toolbox, instead of being audist and only exposing me to speech speech and more speech.
Tell me. How would you feel if you'd grown up with both a learning strengh and a learning weakness, and everything in your life was focused on that weakness? That's what oral only does to most dhh kids...........concentrates exclusively on a weakness!
I don't think you know how limiting and frustrating oral only can be. Even kids who do well orally, very often have significent social issues,(simalir to those with Asperger's Syndrome) or say that they feel like they don't totally fit into the hearing world. You are only a parent............and you're only a parent of a kid who has aquirred SOME speech. Wait a few years and then I think you'll reevaluate your opinon of my experiance. Sure, some kids do well, but there have ALWAYS been kids who do well. That doesn't mean that the MAJORITY will do well!

Why so much focus on the children's weakness sense for learning? Learning requires acquiring a lot of information at once especially when the kids are older so by using the children's strongest sense, learning because less stressful for them.

 

[jillio]

I keep seeing that proven to me by my students who use both speech and sign. I dont understand why forbidding ASL in the educational setting is so desired when research has shown proof that learning becomes easier for the DHH children. Why make learning more difficult for these children than necessary? Why put a child in an environment that doesnt provide a full and equal access to language like hearing children get?

The simple answer is an ehtnocentric perspective that continues to see complete assimilation into the hearing world as desirable for all deaf individuals, despite the price being paid by deaf children.

 

[shel90]

The simple answer is an ehtnocentric perspective that continues to see complete assimilation into the hearing world as desirable for all deaf individuals, despite the price being paid by deaf children.

I know..I was just asking out loud so hopefully some people who are reading this thread can ask themselves these questions. Maybe someone will reconsider and put themselves in the children's shoes.

 

[Tousi]

Everything that u just posted is very much true about my educational upbringing in a strictly oral-only environment. THAT IS WHY I AM AGAINST IT. Why make learning difficult for the children causing them to lose motivation for learning? That is what I will never understand no matter how many times I am told how good oral programs are.

Just so nobody nit-picks later, Shel obviously means she's against oralism ONLY.

 

[jillio]

I know..I was just asking out loud so hopefully some people who are reading this thread can ask themselves these questions. Maybe someone will reconsider and put themselves in the children's shoes.

Yep, we can keep hoping!

 

[shel90]

Just so nobody nit-picks later, Shel obviously means she's against oralism ONLY.

Thanks..I am not against teaching deaf/hoh kids speech skills. We have a speech program at our school and some of the kids do benefit from them greatly. If it helps, sure! Just dont like the idea of children using their weakness sense to learn..too much risk for missing information and falling behind and socio-emotional issues. I wouldnt put my kid thru what I went thru.

 

[deafskeptic]

Why so much focus on the children's weakness sense for learning? Learning requires acquiring a lot of information at once especially when the kids are older so by using the children's strongest sense, learning because less stressful for them.

I'm a great believer in going with your strengths not your weakness.

 

[jillio]

I'm a great believer in going with your strengths not your weakness.

Just makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

 

[vallee]

I agree with a lot of your post, Vallee

But I respectfully disagree about "the best form of research is only 5 years old, not more than 7". Research done 100s of years ago about gravity is good today. Miller's apparatus from 1950s in Biology still gives scientists ideas about the origin of life. And probably some research 2 years ago about stem cell research now is too old.

But bias is a big issue. I am suspicious about research from a company with a financial interest. Yes, maybe the research is valid but maybe not. I have a problem with some CI research because of this - the articles seem limited to show more positives than negatives sometimes.

I first talked about research because you ask about if your view counts for something. To me, people's experience counts, but less than most research. I would not accept a study with one subject and no limits - and this is like one person's experience. When I have a difficult decision I try to look at research for basic understanding. People's experience is more emotional - "this hurt", "I felt great", "I was confused" etc. And is more interesting usually (sometimes not ).
Also I want to know history. Research in science tells you about today, but history matters to me. For example, if you don't know that in the past schools for the deaf prohibited ASL and forced oral, and Alexander Graham Bell thought deaf are a "defective race" and promoted oral, then probably you don't understand a lot of deaf/HoH people's view of oral or parents etc who don't learn ASL for deaf kids.

So a balance I guess, with suspicion about everything without being paranoid. :P

I do agree with your point on research. We both agree that with increase technology then some research is not useful.

The highlighted part is great. I agree completely. Emotions do affect the outcome.

I also feel it is important to understand history. I have read about Deaf History over the years. I do respect the anger and hurt that deaf/HOH people felt/feel. I also feel that some of the history you can take and change, some you can accept and try to move on, and some you put use to change today.

 

[vallee]

I have a question or at least a comment. Jackie's children are older and they are able to now make the choice on what type of communications to use, why is she given a hard time. We can learn from her. We might not agree with the type of communications she picked, but we don't need to have a hostile environment for her. We really don't know why she picked oral or how her children have done.

Lately we have respected each others opinions and discussed more in the past few days then in the 2-3 months I have been here. Instead of embracing her different viewpoint, I feel we have isolated her. I don 't want that to happen. I don't want her to let her children know that is how she was treated, believe me it makes a lasting impression. I am proof of that.

We need to open ourselves up to agree to disagree, but respect each others' opinions. Everyone should be welcome here. We might learn from each other.

 

[shel90]

I have a question or at least a comment. Jackie's children are older and they are able to now make the choice on what type of communications to use, why is she given a hard time. We can learn from her. We might not agree with the type of communications she picked, but we don't need to have a hostile environment for her. We really don't know why she picked oral or how her children have done.

Lately we have respected each others opinions and discussed more in the past few days then in the 2-3 months I have been here. Instead of embracing her different viewpoint, I feel we have isolated her. I don 't want that to happen. I don't want her to let her children know that is how she was treated, believe me it makes a lasting impression. I am proof of that.

We need to open ourselves up to agree to disagree, but respect each others' opinions. Everyone should be welcome here. We might learn from each other.

My issue is not about how Jackie raised her children...it is her posts and comments about the signing deaf children. Some of them just gave me a certain feeling that I am not comfortable with. I would rather not say but it all started before you joined on AD. It is more of her teaching philosophies and her view on the Deaf schools and ASL in the educational setting that I just strongly disagree with.

 

[rick48]

But Rick - do you agree that 1) lipreading is very hard, tiring, and takes time away from learning class information 2) terps fail to show up, is late, or not competent is not usual and can be fixed (replacement) and 3) ASL benefits the deaf/HoH kid?

[COLOR]

As these are generalized statements, no, I do not agree that they apply to all deaf individuals.

You go on to quote extensively from the Center for Hearing Loss Help Learning Center but as they are apparently a for-profit organization why did you choose not preface your comments with the same caveat you utilized when lifting materials from an implant center's website?

Guess you concern for noting the remote possibility of bias, without any proof that it exists, only extends to those for-profit entities who you do not agree with.

 

[rick48]

Of course I am on the child's side. I know how growing up HOH/deaf is.

I also believe in giving parents and children all sides and resources. They need to see all the types of communicates - Total communications, ASl, oral. They need to know the pro and cons of each. to me this is the most important part, the family need to all use it together and practice it together. And if a child is not progress or unhappy, parents and children need to know it is okay to change. There is not one way to educate a child. My motto is Each and every child - not all means all.

QFT Vallee, QFT