Kat Reading

Kat Reading

Saturday, February 21, 2009

3 month post-CI testing

Yesterday at speech, Miss Kat had her 3 month post activation "testing". She did very well.

Now, as a rule, they say up to the first year, we should be focusing on just listening. Hearing babies spend the whole first year of their lives listening before they ever produce a word. Miss Kat is different, first because she is so much older. She is labeled a "late implanted" child....very late in fact, because I think that they start saying "late implanted" at about age 3! But in her favor is the fact that she heard normally for the first year of her life, and then had good amplification with her hearing aids for at least 3 more years after that. Her ears (and therefore brain) have never been without sound. She has never been profoundly deaf either. Even when we implanted her she was hearing into the speech range, at least the lowest frequencies. Overall, I think her last audiogram had her at about 40-45 db across the "speech banana". Which, actually, isn't terrible. It just wasn't working for her. It wasn't enough for her to be able to learn spoken language. Another child could function with Miss Kat's hearing loss, and learn spoken language very easily, but something in her ears was different. She couldn't do it. Also, in Miss Kat's favor is that she already has language. She isn't living without the ability to communicate. Her brain is right where it needs to be, just her ears and mouth are behind!

Ok, so back to the testing. First they did the ESP (Early Speech Perception) test. This test uses very different sounding two syllable words to choose from. The words were "toothbrush", "airplane", "hot dog" and "french fries". When we first started this journey Miss Kat was given this test and she scored 4 out of 24, and those were lucky guesses. Today she got 100% correct.

We moved up to the next test. This test was called the Spondee test. It uses 4 words that begin with the same sound, and have only one syllable. This test is so much more difficult that Miss Kat was never able to even complete the test with anything other than random guesses before her CI. Yesterday they used the words, "book", "ball", "bed" and "bird". Miss Kat missed one because she wasn't paying attention but then corrected it! She had no trouble with this test at all.

The third and final listening test that she had our therapist called the "Mr. Potato Head Challenge". This is a modified open set test that uses sentences. It tests not for discrimination, but for actual comprehension. She had never been close to this level of functioning pre-CI. The therapist would say things like "Hand me Mr. Potato Head's yellow hat" or "Make Mr. Potato Head wave good-bye" and Miss Kat would need to do those things. She did very well. She got 8 out 15 responses. I am amazed at her progress. It has only been 3 months and she is already this far. Miss Kat's therapist said that it can take years for some kids to get to comprehension levels!

They also did a little speech test for Miss Kat too. They flipped over a card and Miss Kat would just say the spoken word for the picture on the card. She had a word approximation for all 20 of the cards. (So there school SLP! You thought a goal of 25 word approximations was appropriate for one year from now? HA!) It was another easy test for her!

Miss Kat is doing so well. I'm so proud of her. I had no idea she would ever be able to do the things she is already doing. She is an amazing girl.

6 comments:

Karen Mayes said...

Your posting made me smile :o)

Something recently happened... not related and yet related to your posting. My daughter recently got a FM system (she wears digital hearing aids) and yesterday she had a word recognition test and she easily passed the test, with FM system, without any visual aids (no ASL.) I always knew she was hard of hearing but I had no idea how good auditory skills she had.

Of course, that got a few people hinting that she'd not need an interpreter later on and I had to say, she needed one because she would still miss out some information, such as students answering the questions or asking questions at some distance from the microphone.

leah said...

Wow- Miss Kat is really soaring! She is certainly moving ahead quickly with the auditory skills!

Our little deaf club has a lot of people from the adult Deaf community that visit (we only have 4-5 kids that are deaf/hh in total). We also have the parents, some TOD's, a few interpreters, and someone that I think was a CODA. I didn't get to talk to her much, though! It's great, because it gives Nolan access to fluent signers (he doesn't get any other access to fluent sign). His speech is taking off, but we don't want him to lose any signing abilities, either!

Charlotte said...

Well done Miss Kat and Mom for her hard work. Hope you are ok after last week.

Take care

Anonymous said...

There's no entry on WHEN SHE GROWS
UP". Blank

Anonymous said...

Miss Kat...

Just to let you know about Deaf Anthology on CI and obesity. His site is all fictional. He just wishes that these things were true or find a way to make fun or bash by making up fictional stories.

Just a dude with a twisted if not sick mind....

mcconnell

Karen Mayes said...

Oh, I went over to Deaf Anthology and saw you left a message.

The author of Deaf Anthology leaves a disclaimer at the top of his blog that what he writes is fictional...