I’ve been reading a lot of new blogs lately, a lot of them written by other people about their cochlear implant experiences. I love random web surfing so I don’t remember how I found most things. When I end up with a couple dozen tabs open in Firefox I try to add blogs to Google Reader and sites to Delicious so I can find things again.
I’ve been looking at a couple of sites this evening that are interesting enough to share.
http://www.esl-lab.com/ is a site with many recordings and quizes. I’ve found that with the “Easy” listening exercises if I read the questions first I can score pretty well on the tests. I’m definitely not understanding more than 20-30% though. Just listing for the answers to the questions. It’s amazing how easy it is to understand when I go back and read the transcript. The harder exercises left me completely lost.
I was reading another site and wanted to share their sound file examples here.
If you have ever wondered what having a hearing loss is like for me, listen to the first two sound files:
The first represents normal hearing (for those of you who need help, the sentence is “She’s drinking from her own cup.”) the second represents a severe/profound hearing loss similar to mine that is amplified with hearing aids.
To me, the second one sounds almost identical to the first one (I can tell there is a P sound missing from the end of CUP on the second). I’ve experienced this before. Back in high school we would request a meeting at the beginning of the year with all my teacher to talk to them about my hearing loss. My audiologist came to one or two of these and she brought a cassette tape that had examples like this on it. I remember my French teacher, Mrs. Anderson, thought that a recording like the second one was how I hear without hearing aids, she couldn’t believe that no, that is what I hear WITH hearing aids. Without hearing aids I don’t hear much of anything.
The other three sound clips on that site have to do with hearing with a CI. All the sound clips are here: http://www.cochlear-implants.net/cochlear_implants/ci_soundfiles.htm
I can tell that the quacky voice one is indeed quacky. The last one sounds a bit off to me, but I can’t tell you why. Don says it sounds perfectly clear, and if that’s how I can hear with a CI, compared to the second clip, then that’s an amazing improvement. We shall see. It is hard to trust any of these sites completely because everyone’s experiences are different. Not to mention changes to technology.
