§ ¶SH, AHm listening to SAHmAHrAH
I had my last session with Dave on July 23rd. The semester was only 12 weeks instead of the usual 15, so it went by quickly. In our last session, we repeated some things we did in the first one, to rate my progress. With over-learned speech contextually clued sentences without a word clue, I scored 14% on the initial test, and 95% on the final test. If you're not sure what that means, I wasn't either. I asked Dave, who clarified that over-learned speech means things that I should be familiar with - not just random sentences I've never heard before. The aural rehab manual splits this into three categories, the first being Contextually Clued Sentences, which are questions with the subject, "Questions about You," and questions like, "What's your name?"With over-learned related sentences (related to a specific subject, like At Bedtime, and "It's time for bed," "Are you sleepy." etc), with a word clue, I initially scored 18% and then at the final test on the 16th, I scored 75%. The hardest test was the WASP test, when Dave basically read off random words. In the pretest, in late May, I identified 1 out of 24 words correctly, and identified 5% of phonemes. This time, I identified 3 out of 24 words, and 54% of all phonemes.
In his final notes, Dave wrote that I've been able to detect SS, SH, and AH sounds nearly 100% of the time, so I no longer need to work on them. However, I still have trouble discriminating between MM, EE, and OO sounds.
Dave also said that some of the results recorded over the length of the summer session may have been adversely impacted by noise coming from other rooms. This has been a problem each semester, but this last one was the worst. Hopefully putting a sign up on the door and educating other staff members will help curtail the issue.
I just spent some time on Lake Erie in Canada with my parents and kids. At the beginning, it was apparent that I was hearing more with my CI. I heard the cat toy bell and immediately asked what the sound was. I took my CI off to see if I could hear it with my hearing aid, and sure enough, I couldn't. The same thing happened at the end of my stay when I heard a tractor on the beach (about to hitch onto a boat). I could hear the cats meow from further away, and one night, I even had a conversation with my parents in the dark as we watched fireworks.
