A moment of clarity

I know it has featured prominently on BBC News, though I can't let this news story slip into the archives without celebrating it here. Thanks to cochlear implants inserted a month ago and activated earlier this week, Jo Milne, a 39-year-old woman from Gateshead in the UK, is now able to hear for the first time in her life. Many other profoundly deaf people have this procedure and it is just as significant to them, as borne out by the many videos posted on YouTube. But thanks to Milne's mother, who filmed the moment on her smartphone, and the fact that the footage was picked up by BBC News, it has become a deeply moving event for us all.

In an earlier edit of the video, aside from her delight at hearing everyday sounds (light switches, running water, a ticking clock), Milne also shows us something very interesting about language. She was able to hear children's voices for the first time and, she was also able to hear what the Geordie accent sounds like. She seemed comforted by the fact that in her immediate vicinity, people sound the same when everyone else sounds so different. I'm intrigued to know how her own speech already has a slight Geordie twang. Do we really model our speech and accent based on the speech of others that quickly?

As a fan of all things to do with phonetics, I'd love to know what phonemes or aspects the speech therapists focus on first in this case. Is it the plosives (/p/ and /b/) and the other bilabial (/m/) – phonemes all formed with the lips but with different attributes (voiceless, voiced, nasal, respectively). Presumably from lip-reading and watching others, these would surely be examples of sounds that a deaf person would know where to produce (place of articulation), without knowing how to produce them (manner of articulation). Would experts then move on to minimal pairs and consonant clusters?

More broadly, in Milne's case especially, we can only speculate on just how, socially and psychologically a person adjusts to a new life of hearing, listening and responding, given that these functions have always been absent for them. It's no wonder that the first voice she heard seemed loud, initially. Any sound at all must seem loud in comparison to almost 40 years of silence.

Jo Milne's experience provides a moment of clarity – literally for her, and also for those of us watching the video with the gift of hearing. We recognise that we are privileged to be able to share in one woman's joy at something most of us take for granted.