Subject: Re: Postlingual cochlear implant: a training method that worked in an N=1 design From: Jeremy Loebach <jeremyloebach@xxxxxxxx> Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:26:37 -0500 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>Dear Pierre, David Pisoni related a similar story to Tessa Bent and myself (who were postdocs in his lab at the time) after he returned from a meeting in New York. I believe that in one case a new CI user listened to Italian tapes (though they did not understand Italian prior to deafness) and found that it transferred to English. As I recall their abilities were not perfect as was the case in your example. After he told us about a second case (I don't recall the circumstances of the case), we decided to design an experiment to test it (using the vocoder rather than CI users themselves). I have included the abstract below and can send a pdf if you are interested. Cheers, Jeremy Bent, T., Loebach, J.L., Phillips, L. & Pisoni D.B. (2011). Perceptual adaptation to sinewave-vocoded speech across languages. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 37(5):1607-1616. Listeners rapidly adapt to many forms of degraded speech. What level of information drives this adaptation, however, remains unresolved. The current study exposed listeners to sinewave-vocoded speech in one of three languages, which manipulated the type of information shared between the training languages (German, Mandarin, or English) and the testing language (English) in an audio-visual (AV) or an audio plus still frames modality (A + Stills). Three control groups were included to assess procedural learning effects. After training, listeners' perception of novel sinewave-vocoded English sentences was tested. Listeners exposed to German-AV materials performed equivalently to listeners exposed to English AV or A + Stills materials and significantly better than two control groups. The Mandarin groups and German-A + Stills group showed an intermediate level of performance. These results suggest that full lexical access is not absolutely necessary for adaptation to degraded speech, but providing AV-training in a language that is similar phonetically to the testing language can facilitate adaptation. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21688936 Jeremy L. Loebach, PhD Department of Psychology St. Olaf College On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Pierre Divenyi <pdivenyi@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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