Eli5: How do people who’ve never had any hearing, but who receive cochlear implants later in life, understand their “native” language?

Question

I’ve seen videos of people sitting in the doctor’s office getting their implants turned on, and they’re responding to questions like, “Can you hear me?” or “How is the volume?” How do they know what they’re being asked if they’ve never before heard how language sounds?

In: 672

Answer 1

If they never heard anything in their life before that, it doesn’t work that well. The brain never learned how to process those inputs (and gets repurposed for other things), so profoundly deaf people usually fare pretty poorly. Like others have said, those people probably had some residual hearing before. Also, it sounds pretty crappy at first, like really distorted with lots of artifacts. It takes some time for the brain and the nerve and the tuning to get dialed in.

Source: u/Chris_El_Deafo is my kid. He recently was re-implanted and had to go through the dialing in again.