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?
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Cochlear implants help with hearing loss, so the person usually has had some semblance of hearing prior in their life before the implants is installed.(hence they can understand is that to loud?) Or they try to install it from ages 2-5 in kids so the device is there in the formative years of language development.
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.
A lot of cochlear implant recipients had completely normal hearing at some point and then lost it. These people usually do extremely well CIs in my experience.
They have to learn it the same way the hearing person did. The older they are, the more work. Source: I’m a Speech-Language Pathologist and Linguist. The human brain is magic
I know that in past years, children were taught to lip read, so maybe that helps them understand.
To directly answer your question. I think that when someone is deaf, they have the visual input of lipreading and use that as a visual aid for language, much like a blind person has braille for reading. When you add sound to the lip movements, they know what they are saying. I’ll give an example. I’m profoundly deaf and I wear a hearing aid. If i were to watch a TV show, but use subtitles, when i read the words, i can “hear” those words very clear. If I looked away from the subs, the words become garbled immediately, I might catch a few words but mostly not. When I return to reading the subs, it becomes clear again. I think those with CI’s use a mix of lipreading from a very young age and the sound and that helps them to know what is being said in their own language.
I hope that makes sense.
So coming from a family where my Mom, aunt, and both Uncles were mostly deaf (They all had hearing aids since they were kids), and 3 of them ended up with cochlear implants.
We never did sign language in our family, instead everyone basically learned how to read lips, so even when my family had their hearing aids off and had no hearing, we could communicate perfectly fine with them as long as we were looking at each other.
I would guess that is what a lot of what you are seeing is. They hear sound, but even if they have no idea what the words sound like, they can still perfectly comprehend by reading lips, just like they could when they were hearing impaired.
Eventually, you begin to put the sounds together with the language and mouth movements you already know.
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