Listening Therapy

Nichole has been seeing a Speech and Language Therapist in Concord Mass (Dorothy) for post-activation auditory rehabilitation (a.k.a Listening Therapy). So far, she has had three one-hour sessions. Dorothy does a great job making it fun for Nichole.

At her first session back on 8/6/07 (1.5 weeks post-activation), Nichole was scoring 86% when repeating sentences verbatim. Dorothy was amazed. Nichole was having trouble discriminating between f/s and d/b but Dorothy said that will come as Nichole's brain re-wires itself.

Nichole's second session on 8/14/07 (3 weeks post-activation) went very well. Dorothy started with the ling sound check, hearing aid only, then CI only. Nichole missed-identified the e and s sounds with her CI (and didn't even hear the s with her HA).

Ling HA CI
a a a
e e e
u u e
m m m
s nothing sh
sh sh sh

During the word recognition exercise, Nichole got 100% of the "easy" words and 83% of the "difficult" words.

At the thirds session (8/21/07 - 4 weeks post-activation), Nichole was getting all the ling sounds. Nichole breezed through the single word recognition exercise, only having some problem discriminating between f and s. So Dorothy did some rapid rhyming words (just changing between Fat and Sat). Nichole go 100% of the words. Dorothy indicated that if you see an issue with mis-identification of two sounds, you can do the rapid ping-pong between two words just varying the problem sound. If they start to discriminate between them, then it is a brain re-wiring issue (needs time) versus a mapping issue. As the session progressed, we noticed that Nichole does have problem with g/d. She said they sound the same. IF you look at the Frequency Allocation Table (FAT) for these two, they have a lot of overlap. Dorothy felt that a mapping modification would help. The session ended with a verbatim activity. Dorothy read a kids rhyming book (Sheep Trick or Treat) and Nichole had to repeat back each phrase. Out of a total of 87 words, Nichole only missed 7, which is a 92% success rate! Dorothy still is amazed at how quickly Nichole's brain has re-wired (as we are)!