Listening is Language!

So my further posts on 2012 resolutions never materialized. To be continued, I guess.

For the moment, I'm just so astounded by how listening and language go hand-in-hand, at least at my current stage in the CI journey. Two auditory therapy sessions I've had in the last two weeks have hit it home for me just how much progress I've made in terms of piecing together sounds when those sounds come in the form of full sentences and phrases. That's the way listening is intended to be, right? Occasionally we hear and discern single words, but more often than not we are listening to the constant flow of the world around us. Sound doesn't happen in a bubble, a vacuum, in which individual words are discrete and isolated. And now I'm doing a better job of hearing that stream of speech and feeling comfortable with it, grabbing onto each piece as it comes, letting the whole thing fit together in my mind. Like magic, honestly.

Let me repeat that last bit: I'm hearing that stream and feeling comfortable with it. Haha! How amazing is that? I still clearly, clearly remember the days (not too long ago!) when the thought of listening to anything beyond one or two words terrified me. It felt impossible - really, it was impossible. During speech therapy in the first eighteen years of my life, my SLP and I would regularly do some base-level listening skills exercises, to develop and use the little hearing that I did have. These exercises came in the form of drills involving the same sets of words over and over again (baseball, bluebird, ice cream - anyone who has a hearing loss and has been subjected to these words in the auditory testing chamber can certainly relate!), some low-level questions about myself (what is your name? what is your address?), and some others that I can't remember, mostly because there wasn't much space to be creative. I never progressed too far beyond these exercises, which after a while we undertook mostly for maintenance and to pair speech development with some level of listening awareness. At that point, I couldn't imagine what the world of listening felt like beyond bluebird, bathtub, sailboat.

But now something ironic has happened. My brain, which already has its connections firing and ready to go with language (something that develops along with listening in hearing children - boy, has my own process taken a different path), is now jumping on that language/listening partnership with surprising gusto. When I drill minimal pair words, or any single words at all, I continue to feel less than confident. These words and drills do exist in a vacuum, a space in which the dynamic, interactive, problem-solving and language-using skills of my brain have no chance to strut their stuff. Single-word drill exercises rely heavily, if not quite solely, on my still underdeveloped capacity to hear something and have the appropriate neurons fire straight to an appreciable meaning. With one word and no linguistic context, that's a pretty hard thing to do. I overanalyze, return to thinking about phonemes and speech production, and end up feeling stuttering and paralyzed. So, instead, the exercises that I've done involving sentences or linguistic phrases (even when these fall into a wide-open set!) have recently become my favorites. They speak to what I already know how to do, but allow me to use my newfound listening skills to exhibit those existing grammatical and language-based proclivities.

A few examples. Exercises with my auditory therapist that involve sentences, stories, questions, and interactive language-based listening skills have recently become so, so much easier than they used to be. Instead of this unintelligible stream of sound that whizzes by too quickly for me to grasp, making my brain panic and scream and want to revert to single-word drills where I will at least have only a few phonemes to make sense of, I've somehow arrived at the point where I can proceed much more methodically. The words seem to go by slower instead of at warp speed, because I am able to make more sense of them when they do come. My grammatical sense kicks in: there's the subject, verb, pronoun, conjunction. If I miss one or another, I hold that spot in my mind until I have enough auditory information to go back and fill in the blanks, matching the rough sketch of what I might have heard with something more precise. And, in the process of filling in those blanks (something remarkably like lipreading! lifelong skills ftw!) I actually end up learning. The next time I hear that missed word, I jump on it much quicker. There are fewer gaps in general these days as I expand my auditory memory and become more skilled at grabbing words out of the air. The best days are when I don't need to think analytically at all, but when the words simply - come. Though I of course still get stuck, sentences like that are becoming more frequent.

All this auditory information would have been unfathomable to me a few months ago, let alone years. And in my daily interactions with people, I find that my mind latches onto phrases that others say to me at close range while passing. "Have a nice day," "see you later," "sounds good," "how are you?", and so forth are now old friends in my conversational listening world. I'd likely catch more than that if I tried, or had to, or put in the time to familiarize myself with these people's voices. I'm a little giddy just thinking of all this conversational speech. The new frontiers that have opened up, and the new and wonderful clarity that I'm discovering with the CI, where language just comes in and sounds and feels natural, like I've visually known it for years but yet never discovered in the specific mode of hearing.

I really can't describe this newfound liking for listening-cum-language skills or how much it means to me. Listening is language! Just like language on the page or signed in the air or anywhere else! Ahhh what a concept!

Milestones!

Today I popped on my CI and drove out for my first session with an auditory therapist since September. I'd been into her office once or twice over the summer when I flew out for remappings, but due to being gone for so long I hadn't been on any kind of directed program. Go out into the world and figure out the sounds in it! That was my task.

And, in many ways, it will continue to be my task for a while yet. CI rehab, if nothing else, is very individually motivated. I was pleased to find today that I've achieved a slew of milestones since July and September - things that were hard or impossible for me then are easy now. (Or, if not easy, then possible. That's still encouraging!) I could identify all of the major speech sounds, something which brought back memories of sitting in my house in July getting frustrated over "ah" and "oo" and wondering if this contraption would ever make sense. Ah, YES. Sentence and word identification, provided that I had a closed set, also turned out to be a relative breeze, even without a leading phrase for minimal-pair words. Open sets are still a struggle, not unexpectedly so, but I'm picking out bits and sounds throughout the sentences I'm given. (This is something I've noticed in everyday use, while sitting where I cannot lipread a person - I can catch the common words like "and," "but," "or," "I mean," "you know." Of course, this doesn't help very much with the sentence at large. But it's something!)

We also discussed brain and listening development up to this point and in the future, talked about the interaction between hearing aid and CI (which continues to evolve), thought about issues in quiet versus noise (still one of my biggest challenges), plus came up with some strategies for dealing with everyday situations and continuing my everyday listening practice. Every day that I wear the CI is practice! I need to remember that; all along I've been hard on myself for not doing enough structured listening. But my brain does pick up on meanings and nuances on its own, I still don't know how. One example: I was told today, and have been told by countless people at other times, that my speech has really noticeably improved since the CI. It's not that I spoke poorly before, just that my enunciation has smoothened out, become more regular, and my clarity and volume is the best it's been. Now, this is nice to hear, but it's not something that's happened consciously. I don't think more about my speech now than I did seven months ago. It's just my brain automatically and subconsciously correcting old habits to correspond with how I hear other people talk. How wild is that?

Finally, one of my big takeaway points is that, moving forward, building self-confidence will be key. Once I believe that I can do something, once I relax and smile and take it in stride, then listening comes easier and easier. This entire process of disproving my two-decade-old convictions is quite strange... But how wonderful to have a day where everything falls into perspective!

To the Mattresses

As I think was apparent in my last post, this is where the real work begins - or continues! My time after returning from a quarter abroad was largely a time for me to regroup, to literally and figuratively catch my breath, and I did little structured listening outside of a few covered-mouth conversations. Leading up to my remapping two weeks ago (which, in a nutshell, readjusted the electrode input and gave me a new program with a noise-reduction filter, which has been amazing for loud/distracting/overwhelming places like restaurants - I find that I can make out individual voices from among the hubbub!), I was content to let things glide along for a bit.

But now that I've returned to the structure of classes and the college lifestyle, I'm a bit more motivated to pick up the listening-exercises pace again. This is especially true after jumping back into an environment in which I'm surrounded by hearing people who: 1) unthinkingly assume that my abilities will be up to "normal-person" par, 2) ask me how the hearing is going (a natural question to ask, since I haven't seen them for so long) and therefore make me want to stay in practice, or 3) seem to have no idea how much my life has changed in the last six months, making me feel simultaneously dismayed and gleeful. Yes, a complicated mix, but that's the way things go.

So, I'm dogged again. The audiobooks are back. Appointments with an auditory therapist are upcoming. In class I challenge myself to listen, really listen, to the professor and predict what he/she says before the interpreter signs it. (Amusingly, this has brought up several instances where I notice that the interp has misstepped or paraphrased. Score!) Phone conversations - after literally a three-month hiatus - are working their way into my daily schedule.

These conversations have been the hardest part. They're not "conversations," per se, in that when my parents call we're not talking normally about anything. Rather, they're structured listening exercises, often accompanied by computer instant messages out of necessity. The usefulness of technology. Talking on the phone is way harder than talking in person, mainly because the range of frequencies inherent to human speech is literally compressed over the connection. Hence, speech doesn't sound like what I'm used to. It doesn't sound as dynamic and lifelike. People tend to sound far away, whispery or muffled, or just plain strange. Complicating the problem is the fact that I have absolutely no real previous phone experience with hearing aids to fall back on. I'm using the phone for the first time in my life. And sitting in a room by myself with a receiver pressed to my ear, straining to decipher the disembodied voice from the other end, is a real whoa! moment. It feels unnatural, I almost don't believe that I can do it, I start to panic, and the vicious cycle begins.

But, as with everything else, I've found that practice is key. Three days this week I've gone to the mattresses with the phone. The first time (also my first time since September, mind you) I was a wee bit too ambitious, and ended up feeling shaken, to say the least. Tonight I was actually smiling, picking up on impromptu bits and sometimes finding myself able to automatically reply. A bit like doing headstands at times, but the confidence that practice brings is astonishing.

Now, what happens when I do this every day? I can't wait!

Piece by Piece

The practice continues. But now, instead of listening to words like “banana” and “corn,” over and over again (or, even more tediously, “shhh” and “mmmm”), I find myself vaulting to giddy new heights. The last few weeks have brought an explosion of words to my auditory memory, skills to my repertoire. Listening exercises, instead of being a frustrating chore, have become a way for me to open the door ever wider into the world of sound. I now practice a wild variety of sentences, and even verge on short open-set conversations. Just think, me having a conversation through listening alone! And understanding! Granted, these conversations are about very familiar topics, with very familiar family members, but this doesn’t stop me from wanting to dance around the room.

These triumphs, though, don’t come without a good deal of drill and repetition. Our exercises have encompassed a range of categories, words, and ideas – and the exciting part is that I cast my net out farther with each day. Animals. Food. Flowers. Pieces of furniture. Sports and hobbies. Names of family members, friends, and pets. Numbers, months, days of the week. Social occasions. American states. Foreign countries. Random adjectives and verbs. All of these – framed in short sentences such as “I am traveling to ____ in ____,” or “Bob likes to eat ____” – are working their way into my auditory vocabulary. Some of them I now get easily, even lazily. Others, particularly new words I have not practiced before, I find flabbergasting at first. But the common pattern, ever astonishing to me, is that once I’ve heard a word once or twice, thereafter I can understand it almost without effort. The other night, I faltered when my mother said “flower arranging” in one of our practice sentences. But, several minutes later, when it came up again – snap. I knew. My brain had latched onto those words, formed some kind of neural connection already, without my conscious input. Isn’t it amazing?

Eventually, the hope is, I’ll be familiar enough with these words that they’ll flow in and I’ll grasp them without thought. But, I’ve discovered, this will not be the whole story. Another unexpected challenge is retaining what I’ve heard – not only recognizing the pieces of the puzzle, but holding on to those pieces long enough to assemble the entire picture. Now, I’ve always had a good memory, but I find that it sometimes fails me as far as hearing goes. Case in point: practicing random phone numbers. If I see a phone number written down, I remember it easily. But hearing it – that’s a different pathway, one that my brain has never had to use before. The numbers streak by, but as soon as I’ve grasped one, another is on its way. At the end of the string, I’ll stammer and say, “Wait – I understood that when I heard it, but now it’s not there!” It’s amusing how hard this is, and I often resort to spluttering, “Eight-something-seven-something-twotwothree!”

Even funnier, to me, are my auditory faux-pases. I’ve long been used to misunderstanding what people say, through lipreading, but I’ve rarely been able to find it amusing rather than embarrassing. Now, though, I’ve been blessed with the ability to laugh (sometimes uncontrollably) at what my brain thinks I hear, before it’s learned a word properly. Take these gems from a conversation with my sister Leigh:

L: I eat mangoes. Wait, why are you laughing?

R: It’s… never mind. Say it again.

L: What? Tell me!

R: It – it sounds like you said, ‘I eat my legs!’

[Later, after we’ve calmed down again]

L: I eat watermelon.

R: You eat Ronald Reagan!

L [laughing]: They don’t even sound the same!

R: Yes, they do – say it fast, watermelonRonaldReaganwatermelon!

[Later, approaching the edge]

L: I eat apples. Okay, what is it? Tell me!

R [laughing]: You eat bottles!

Other gems abound. Sometimes the sounds are somewhat close, other times they’re way off. Where does my brain dig up these things? Once it has fastened onto a supposed ‘meaning’ for a word, it stubbornly casts that nonsensical meaning onto that word every time. Even as I protest that that can’t possibly be right, that it doesn’t make sense. I’m at odds with myself. And yes, there are lasting consequences – even though I can now recognize “watermelon” for its true meaning, I still can’t hear it without thinking “Ronald Reagan!”

At the end of the listening road (wherever that is), along with an impressive arsenal of words in my auditory dictionary, I could have some very interesting mental connotations…