More on Meaghan

I'm getting settled in my new apartment, and while I hope to post pictures soon, it's in no state to be photographed at the moment. Until then:

I learned more about Meagan's hearing loss recently. She and a partner gave a presentation on deaf reading education, and it was quite interesting. As her partner, Shelley, pointed out, deaf kids who are learning how to read need to know how to identify all the different sounds represented by letters when they learn to read, even though they can't hear them, which is obviously a major challenge. Their presentation focused on kids like Meagan, who have some hearing or have aids to help them hear; these are the kinds of kids that we will be able to instruct as hearing teachers who know no sign language. Methods helpful to kids with hearing loss involve using lots of visual clues to help them differentiate between sounds they can't hear the same way that hearing kids can.

Meagan has a cochlear implant. For some reason, we learned a lot about cochlear implants in my high school physics class. When I was at Vanderbilt, we learned about them in my special education class, too, so I have a fair bit of background knowledge about them. Unlike hearing aides, which amplify sounds so that they hit the eardrum at a higher volume, cochlear implants act as ears, essentially hearing for a deaf person. Sounds are translated into electrical impulses which travel straight to the areas of the brain that interpret sounds. Meagan's implant isn't perfect, and even with it she's unable to hear sounds with high frequencies. The younger a child is when s/he is implanted, the more successful they'll be in acquiring speech and being a successful member of the hearing world. Meagan's obviously very smart, and her parents were very involved in her development, so although she wasn't implanted until she was six, her language skills are about as good as anyone's.

In the deaf community, cochlear implants are very controversial. Many deaf people are fiercely proud of who they are and what they can do without hearing, and they don't want their children implanted for fear that they'll become more involved in the hearing world than in the deaf community. In Meagan's case, because both of her parents are hearing, getting the implant wasn't really a choice; as a member of her family and community, it was unquestionably beneficial for her to communicate through speech rather than sign language. It gets sticky when both parents are deaf though, because young children clearly cannot make the decision to be implanted or not, and if a person decides later in life that they want the implant after all, they're probably not going to benefit much because they'll have spent so many years of their lives developing without one. Once one is past adolescence, the chances of acquiring a new language on the level of a native are pretty much zero, and that's for able-bodied learners who can hear with perfect clarity. Implanted adults are still missing a lot of the sounds in spoken English and acquire it even more slowly.