Hi!
So you have a ‘lot’ of videos where people hear the voice of their parents or anyone else for the first time.
Presumably they were born deaf. What’s the process of actually understanding what is being said like?
In: Biology
I’m essentially guessing here but if they can’t read lips I’d say no, but many who are deaf can read lips. Verbal language is essentially a foreign language to them.
I’d say it’s comparable to if you tried learning braille (or sign language) right now, using a new sensation (I know you can feel your fingers but running them along dots will be new, close enough for the analogy) you’re connecting something to a language you already know it’s just a representation you have 0 basis for. You’ll probably figure it out faster than learning from scratch but it’ll take you a while to be practiced enough with feeling them to make everything out right and get all the letters and convert properly
The process usually involves extensive auditory training and therapy to learn how to interpret the sounds and words they’re hearing for the first time.
You already know several ways to represent the same words in the language. You can see it written down or you can hear it spoken out loud. When you know one it does not take much effort to learn the other. This is what kids learn in kindergarden or early elementary school and why these classrooms all have the alphabet with pictures of things starting with that letter. It is so the kids learn to associate a written letter with a sound.
Deaf people all learn to read and a lot of them also learn to spell using sign language or even reading lips. So they already know the language, they just don’t know the sounds associated with the letters. When they get a hearing aid they can start learn this. It is just the reverse of what children learn in school. Except it is usually easier to teach adults as they have lots of motivation to learn this for themselves.
When you see videos of people as their hearing aid gets turned on they are not communicating through sound. It is too early for this. But they are already very good at communicating without sound through various means. There is often a sign interpreter off camera, this might be a close relative or it might be a hired sign interpreter. You often see this as the patient tends to look at something off camera even as doctors right next to them are speaking to them.
Cochlear implants have varying rates of success. And even the most successful patients can hear like a hearing person. So if they are a child who was born Deaf they have big hurtles to deciphering speech. Speech therapy is the go to answer for these folks. if you are older and receive a cochlear implant, you are already used to what sounds like interpreting them is much easier.
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