It was a beautiful April day when we drove to the laboratory where Julia the lab manager met us and showed us the fancy cap of electrodes they had recently begun using. Alex started out brave.
“I want to go first because I’m the one with this,” he said, pointing to his processor.
Once in the soundproof booth, though, sitting alone in the big black vinyl chair as lab staff wielding wires surrounded him, he began to look nervous and called for me to come in and sit with him. Jake and Matthew would use the new “net” of electrodes, a cap that was easy to put on and take off. For Alex, Julia used a conductive gel and taped nine electrodes to various spots on his head: one at the top, two behind and below each ear, and the rest around his forehead and on the top of his nose.
On a television in front of him, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe played silently. Suddenly, “ba, ba, ba” blared from the speakers to Alex’s left and right. “It sounds like a frog,” said Matthew later, when it was his turn. Alex squeezed my hand and together we listened to the full-throated croaking—ba, ba, ba—and watched Lucy meet Mr. Tumnus by the lamppost in the snowy woods of Narnia.
Just like they were supposed to, the repeated speech sounds evoked a response in Alex’s brain. The results—line after line of waveforms—brought good news. There was a range for normal and Alex was in it. Through both ears, with the hearing aid and the cochlear implant, his auditory cortex had been consistently receiving enough sound that it had developed an N1 and P1 that could have been that of a hearing child.
As if to prove it, that same night, at a noisy Mexican restaurant with friends who lived in Boulder, Alex insisted we play Whisper down the Line, his new favorite game. He was terrible at it, mangling the words that I passed on to him after Matthew passed them on to me. But still … who would have ever thought? He could hear me whisper.
• • •
Nearly a year after Mark suggested we move, Alex and I sat at the table in our new apartment with his second-grade homework from the Hong Kong International School.
I had double-checked the batteries in Alex’s cochlear implant and hearing aid, so I knew that when he first ignored my request to sit down and focus, it was probably not because he didn’t hear me but because he wanted to finish telling Matthew about the funny thing that happened on the school bus. After one more trip to the kitchen for another yogurt, though, he had settled down to show me what he’d learned about how to complete the double-and triple-digit arithmetic problems he’d been assigned.
When we moved on to reading, which he had to do for twenty minutes, he pulled out his beloved copy of Frog and Toad All Year and picked a story to read aloud. Since the holidays were coming, he chose “Christmas Eve,” in which Frog is late for Christmas Eve supper and Toad imagines all the horrible things that might have befallen his friend.
“What if Frog has fallen into a deep hole and cannot get out?” read Alex.
“‘What if Frog is lost in the woods?’” He added some drama to his voice. “‘What if he is cold and wet and hungry? What if he is being chased by a big animal with many sharp teeth? What if he is being eaten up?’” cried Alex.
Fortunately, Frog had simply gotten delayed wrapping Toad’s present. Alex turned reflective as he read the last lines about the two friends enjoying a quiet evening by the fire. He closed the book.
“I can’t wait for Christmas, Mommy,” he said. “When can we get our tree?”
We talked about Christmas for a few minutes—it would be our first away from family and home.
Then I reminded him to enter the book’s title into his reading log. There was a spot for assessing the book’s difficulty. A month before, he had called it “Just Right.”
“I think it’s ‘Too Easy’ now,” he admitted.
I gave him a hug, a kiss, and a “good job, sweetheart,” and he went off to play with his new friend Christopher who lived upstairs.
Except for the bit about the batteries, it could have been a scene at anyone’s dining room table.
NOTES
Comments that came from my interviews are indicated in the present tense (“says” rather than “said”). Those from other sources are cited below.
CHAPTER 1: THE COW AND THE RED BALLOON
For personal chapters, I relied on my journals, recollections of events, and files of reports about Alex from audiologists, doctors, speech therapists, and teachers. I also interviewed some of the professionals who have worked with Alex over the years.
David Kemp discovered: Information on otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) is available at http://www.asha.org/public/hearing/Otoacoustic-Emissions/. OAEs and other diagnostic hearing tests are also described in Debby Waldman with Jackson Roush, Your Child’s Hearing Loss: What Parents Need to Know (New York: Perigee, 2005). An American Academy of Audiology interview with David Kemp is at http://www.audiology.org/news/Pages/20090106b.aspx. Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi Murkoff, and Sandee Hathaway, What to Expect the First Year (New York: Workman, 1996). [Latest edition published 2010.]
CHAPTER 2: A NEW WORLD
Two or three in a thousand: For statistics on hearing loss, I referred to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), at http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/Pages/quick.aspx; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), at http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/hearingloss/data.html; and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, at http://www.asha.org/aud/Facts-about-Pediatric-Hearing-Loss/.
Sam Supalla: In Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 15–16. This story was also recounted to me by Ted Supalla. Also in Padden and Humphries, Deaf in America: “For hearing people” a different center, “A Deaf couple,” THINK-HEARING.
deaf community’s pride: To read about identity and illness, see chap. 1, “Son,” in Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
You could be deaf or Deaf: There is a full discussion of terms used to describe hearing loss, varieties of hearing loss, and cultural terms in the first two chapters of Marc Marschark, Raising and Educating a Deaf Child (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and a thoughtful discussion on this subject in “Identity and the Power of Labels,” the first chapter of Irene W. Leigh, A Lens on Deaf Identities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The National Association of the Deaf gives a full explanation of its views on labels at http://www.nad.org/issues/american-sign-language/community-and-culture-faq. See also AG Bell’s listening andspokenlanguage.org.
a tribe in Namibia: See “Do You See What I See?” BBC Two Horizon, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14421303.
“Deafness as such”: From Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices (New York: Vintage, 1989), 94.
“Language really does”: Paula Tallal’s interview on Phonological Processing, with David Boulton, Children of the Code, at http://www.childrenofthecode .org/interviews/tallal.htm.
“equally suitable for making love or speeches”: Sacks, Seeing Voices, 101. For discussion of deaf educational underachievement, see Marschark, Raising and Educating a Deaf Child, 165; John B. Christiansen, Reflections: My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2010) 214; Commission on Education of the Deaf, Toward Equality: Education of the Deaf, Report to the President and the Congress of the United States, 1988; Sue Archbold and Gerard M. O’Donoghue, “Education and Childhood Deafness: Changing Choices and New Challenges,” in John K. Niparko, ed., Cochlear Implants: Principles & Practices, 2nd ed. (New York: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2009). For deaf reading levels, see Carol Bloomquist Traxler, “The Stanford Achievement Test, 9th Edition: National Norming and Performance Standards for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 5 no. 4, (2000): 337–348; Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer, “Epilogue: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Should Know,” in The Oxfo
rd Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language and Education, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Deaf graduation and employment rates: Blanchfield BB, Feldman JJ, Dunbar JL, Gardner EN. The severely to profoundly hearing-impaired population in the United States: “Prevalence Estimates and Demographics,” Journal of the American Academy of Audiology (2001): 12:183–189. National Technical Institute for the Deaf Collaboratory on Economic, Demographic, and Policy Studies: http://www.ntid.rit.edu/research/collaboratory.
“a miracle of biblical proportions”: Steve Parton, quoted in Edward Dolnick, “Deafness as Culture,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1993.
National Association of the Deaf … position on cochlear implants: NAD position papers, 1990, 2000. See also: John B. Christiansen and Irene W. Leigh, Cochlear Implants in Children: Ethics and Choices (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 257.
“genocide” and “child abuse”: See Dolnick, Atlantic Monthly; Andrew Solomon, “Defiantly Deaf,” New York Times Magazine, August 28, 1994.
CHAPTER 3: HOW LOUD IS A WHISPER?
“maniacal miniature golf course”: Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses (New York: Vintage, 1991), 177.
our keenest hearing: E. Bruce Goldstein, Sensation and Perception, 8th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 265; Thomas D. Rossing, F. Richard Moore, and Paul A. Wheeler, The Science of Sound, 3rd ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2002), 335.
Prehistoric ears: Discussed in section on ear damage in Rossing et al., Science of Sound, 722.
For sound waves, the mechanics of hearing, and decibel levels, see Rossing et al., Science of Sound, chaps. 1 and 5; Goldstein, Sensation and Perception, 261–272; House Clinic, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Hearing Loss (New York: Alpha Books, 2010), 10–13.
For sound versus vision, see Rossing et al., Science of Sound, 79–80.
more going on than that: Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006), 41–46.
For frequency of speech sounds/speech banana, see American Academy of Audiology table, “Audiogram of Familiar Sounds.”
For bone conduction, see Rossing et al., Science of Sound, 85. ABR is described in Waldman and Roush, Your Child’s Hearing Loss, 34.
In one state’s survey: Marschark, Raising and Educating a Deaf Child, 14–15, citing research by Christine Yoshinaga-Itano.
CHAPTER 4: A STREAM OF SOUND
nearly seven thousand languages: http://www.ethnologue.com/world.
Most begin to talk: See Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World (New York: Scribner, 2006), 2–3; and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life (New York: Dutton, 1999).
“doubtless the greatest intellectual feat”: Leonard Bloomfield, Language (New York: Henry Holt, 1933).
From Saint Augustine to Charles Darwin: Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn (New York: Morrow, 1999), 98.
Chomsky disagreed: For Skinner versus Chomsky, see Yang, Infinite Gift, 16–18.
Universal grammar explained: Yang, Infinite Gift, 8, 16–31; Gopnik et al., Scientist in the Crib, 99–102.
Victor of Aveyron: Harlan Lane, When The Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York: Vintage, 1989), 122–132.
Genie: Susan Donaldson James, “Wild Child ‘Genie’: A Tortured Life,” Associated Press, May 8, 2008, at http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/national_world&id=6130233; Gopnik et al., Scientist in the Crib, 192.
“miniature languages”: See Maryia Fedzechkina, T. Florian Jaeger, and Elissa L. Newport, “Language Learners Restructure Their Input to Facilitate Efficient Communication,” PNAS 109 no. 44 (2012): 17897–17902; and Carla L. Hudson Kam and Elissa L. Newport, “Getting it right by getting it wrong: When learners change languages,” Cognitive Psychology 59 no. 1 (2009): 30–66. For discussion of the “less is more” theory, see also Elissa L. Newport, “Maturational Constraints on Language Learning,” Cognitive Science 14 no. 1 (1990): 11–28.
Hart and Risley: Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing, 1995). Quotes from Risley come from an interview by David Boulton for Children of the Code, at http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/risley.htm.
a lively, ongoing debate: Interview with Elissa Newport. See also Elissa L. Newport, “Plus or Minus 30 Years in the Language Sciences,” Topics in Cognitive Science 2 no. 3 (2010): 367–373; and Elissa L. Newport, “The Modularity Issue in Language Acquisition: A Rapprochement? Comments on Gallistel and Chomsky,” Language Learning and Development 7 no. 4 (2011), 279–286.
“nurture is our nature”: Gopnik et al., Scientist in the Crib, 8.
“Children … are innovators” … Songbirds interest linguists: Yang, Infinite Gift, 4–5.
the somewhat methodical way babies focus: Interviews with Athena Vouloumanos and with Gina Lebedeva, director of Translation, Outreach, and Education, Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington (lab of Patricia Kuhl). See also: Judit Gervain, Iris Berent, and Janet F. Werker, “Binding at Birth: The Newborn Brain Detects Identity Relations and Sequential Position in Speech,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 24 no. 3 (2012): 564–574; Athena Vouloumanos and Janet F. Werker, “Listening to Language at Birth: Evidence for a Bias for Speech in Neonates,” Developmental Science 10 no. 2 (2007): 159–171; Athena Vouloumanos and Janet F. Werker, “Tuned to the Signal: The Privileged Status of Speech for Young Infants,” Developmental Science 7 no. 3 (2004): 270–276; Athena Vouloumanos et al., “Five-month-old infants’ identification of the sources of vocalizations,” PNAS 106 no. 44 (November 3, 2009): 18867–18872; Gopnik et al., Scientist in the Crib, 106–110.
CHAPTER 5: “SOME MEANS OF INSTRUCTING”
My main sources on the early history of deaf education are Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf; David Wright, Deafness: An Autobiography (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993); and Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America, and their second book, Inside Deaf Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Page references below as well as additional sources.
Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée: Quotes are from Lane, When the Mind Hears, 57–58. See also Padden and Humphries, Deaf in America, 27—29, and Wright, Deafness, 183.
“It has come to symbolize”: Padden and Humphries, Deaf in America, 29.
Samuel Johnson: From A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, quoted in Wright, Deafness, 179.
indistinguishable from that of the mentally ill: Wright, Deafness, ix.
Ponce de Léon: Ibid., 164–168, and Lane, When the Mind Hears, 90–94. Pedro de Velasco is quoted in both books. I have used the translation from Wright.
“a breakthrough that shattered”: Wright, Deafness, 171.
Juan Pablo Bonet: Ibid., 167–171, and Lane, When the Mind Hears, 86–94.
Epée’s system: Wright, Deafness, 183–186; Lane, When the Mind Hears, 36, 58–63; Marschark, Raising and Educating a Deaf Child, 71.
Epée prevailed upon the French state: Wright, Deafness, 187–188; Lane, When the Mind Hears, 33.
Abbé Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard: Lane, When the Mind Hears, 32–41; Wright, Deafness, 188.
twelve more similar schools … rose to sixty: Lane, When the Mind Hears, 64.
Jean Massieu: Ibid., 17–23.
“What is hope? … vigor of the mind”: Ibid., 22–23.
Johann Conrad Amman … and John Wallis: Ibid., 100–106.
“The breath of life”: Ibid., p. 100. Wright, Deafness, 172–178.
Samuel Heinicke: Wright, Deafness, 186–187; Lane, When the Mind Hears, 102–103 (taste technique, 103); Gabriel Grayson, Talking with Your Hands, Listening with Your Eyes (Garden City Park, NY
: Square One, 2003), 3. Alexander Graham Bell Association website: www.listeningandspokenlanguage.org (the history page is no longer part of the website).
Heinicke sent Epée an extensive argument: Wright, Deafness, 186.
Oral versus manual: Ideas mentioned here are recounted in many places and were discussed in many interviews I did, but the early arguments are summarized in Wright, Deafness, xv–xvii, 207, 226–229, and contemporary arguments in Marschark, Raising and Educating a Deaf Child, 90–91, on the website of the American School for the Deaf at http://www.asd-1817.org/page.cfm?p=430, and on the AG Bell website at http://listeningandspokenlanguage.org/Document.aspx?id=387.
Gallaudet paid particular attention to … Alice Cogswell: Lane, When the Mind Hears, 173–176, and Edward Miner Gallaudet, Life of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, Founder of Deaf-Mute Instruction in America, originally published by Henry Holt, 1888, reprinted by Forgotten Books, 2012, 46–57.
“immediate and deep … instruct her”: Lewis Weld, Alice Cogswell’s brother-in-law, quoted in Gallaudet, Life of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, 47–48.
Gallaudet set off for Britain: Lane, When the Mind Hears, 185–205; Gallaudet, Life of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, 57–110.
Oh! how this poor heathen people: Gallaudet, quoted in Lane, When the Mind Hears, 196.
The American Asylum, the first school: See website of American School for the Deaf at http://www.asd-1817.org/page.cfm?p=429; Lane, When the Mind Hears, 222 and 238; Wright, Deafness, 197.
Edward Miner Gallaudet: Lane, When the Mind Hears, 276–278; Edward Miner Gallaudet, “A History of the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, 1912.
Mabel Hubbard: Lane, When the Mind Hears, 312–315; Charlotte Gray, Reluctant Genius: Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention (New York: Arcade, 2006), chap. 4; website of Clarke School at http://www.clarkeschools .org/about/welcome.
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