Picking up people's insensitivity

Several months ago I wrote a piece here called A moment of clarity, focussing on the instant when a deaf woman was able to hear for the very first time. I return to the topic of deafness today, having read an interesting piece in The Guardian yesterday. On this occasion, a woman described her slightly different experience of having progressively degenerative hearing restored to normal levels after 20 years – again thanks to a cochlear implant.

The article caught my attention because it provided more insight into the personal gains and losses of the implant, as well as the adjustment required to start living a new life as a member of 'the hearing gang'. I find the issue fascinating because, as someone who suffers with tinnitus – and very slight hearing loss as a result; coping strategies when you miss a joke in a noisy room used to create the feeling of – partly self-imposed – social isolation the 'new hearer' describes.

But if we're honest, much of the small talk we feel obliged to engage in is merely a politeness ritual which, in reality, is fairly inconsequential. We could even be forgiven for thinking that the writer of the piece secretly enjoyed being able to 'zone out' from the exhausting task of trying to decipher so much content for such little reward. This approach seems entirely justified when well-meaning 'hearing' friends announce “It’s so good to be able to finally speak," provoking this response from the writer:

I'm still angry. They couldn't be bothered to include you before, so why should you bother listening now? What gives them the right to enjoy the benefits of your new hearing?

To me, that's no different to the school bully suddenly sending you a friend request on social media. It's an action designed entirely to make the other person – not you – feel better. The implant may be a signal to hearing friends that the wearer is instantly 'back in the room'; though for the individual concerned, it is merely the first step on a new journey – where even turn-taking in conversations is new territory. After all, as the writer indicates: how can she suddenly know what quantity of speech is appropriate in each situation? How does she know where to place herself on the secret scale that everyone else seems to understand? It's the scale that ranges from 'withdrawn' to 'monosyllabic', 'quiet', 'reserved', 'chatty' and 'bubbly' right up to 'self-obsessed'.

As she and others like her decide whether the implant represents a new sense or a nuisance, those of us with (almost) perfect hearing should celebrate this new-found social inclusion; while remaining sensitive to the scale of the adjustment involved. Though the more success stories we hear about cochlear implants; the more of these personal testimonies will be published. As a result, we will all gain a better understanding of that complex world between aural exile and full interaction that many people now have to negotiate – some of them for the first time in their lives.

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.