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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It often takes years of exposure, often therapy, to understand spoken language for someone with lifelong profound deafness.
The videos you see of older people understanding speech when their implant is activated often lost hearing later in life.
Your native language is the first language you learn. If a Deaf child learns sign language first, then that is their native language.
When they get their cochlear, then they’d be learning their L2 or second language.
When profoundly Deaf children aren’t provided with language early on (including signed languages)… they are delayed in their learning until that education begins. The language center of their brain would be better off if they used sign language to start that process until they had the surgery. That way, those language centers start to be developed, and they’d experience less of a developmental delay.
Source: I have a degree in American Sign Language interpreting.
I’m an audiologist that works with cochlear implant patients. Truthfully, they don’t, and they probably won’t ever be able to either. If someone is prelingually deafened, such as congenital deafness or losing their hearing as an infant, not only will they have never learned their language or any language, but the pathways that carry information from the ears to the brain, and the organization of that auditory information into language the brain will never have developed. If you saw a video like that, it’s possible they had some hearing loss from birth but were not completely deaf, or lost their hearing over time, but learned language first. Or they’re reading lips. We generally want length of deafness to be less than 3 years. Outcomes gradually get worse past that. You can go as far as 10 but we have to be realistic about the outcomes in that case. Anything over that and you’re looking at maybe just getting awareness of sound, but probably not speech.
There are ALWAYS one in a thousand exceptions where someone does very unusually well, or unusually poorly. Maybe your video was one of those. It’s still hard to believe that they would understand a language they’ve never spoken or heard, though.
Maybe they’re lipreading? Then they just have to match what they see with the sounds.
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