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Postlingual cochlear implant: a training method that worked in an N=1 design



Hello CI folks,

At an informal gathering I met a gentleman who told me about his 38-year old son-in-law losing his hearing after a car going > 60 mph hit him on his bicycle. It was a miracle that he survived but he suffered major concussion, memory loss, and shortly after the event also his hearing, bilaterally. He slowly recovered his cognitive functions but not his hearing. After 4 years of trying to get by with lip reading alone, he got a cochlear implant. As it is the case for many adult CI patients whose loss was not congenital, he did hear sounds but had difficulty understanding speech. So, he trained himself by watching foreign films on DVD that had an original non-English track with subtitles and also a dubbed English track: he set the video on the subtitled track and the audio on the English track. Within a few months of using this training method, his speech understanding improved to a point that was considered essentially perfect by himself and his entourage.

Although the story is obviously not scientific, I thought it would be found interesting by some of you reading the list.

-Pierre