Addendum--Jack's language boom

Since writing the recent post on Jack's growing language skills, we've had a couple of more exciting developments. A week ago, while at speech, his therapist tested his skills by having him point to pictures she named, and having him say words for other pictures. The results were better than I had hoped for.....in his receptive language (what he understands) he is now considered at the language age of a 2 year 1 month old, and his expressive language (what he says) is equal to that of a 2 year old. To put this in perspective, his therapist showed me his test results from 6 months ago, and he had tested in receptive language at 12 mos old, and expressive language at 12-15 mos old, meaning on average he has gained 2 months of language per 1 month time period, and he's closing the gap between his chronological age and language age!!! I am a BIT excited about this, if you can't tell.

Then, on the following Monday, Jack had an audiology appointment and did beautifully. During audiology, the audiologist tests his implants' inner electrodes to make sure they are working and then tries to pinpoint Jack's thresholds for the softest and loudest sounds he can hear, so she can set his "ears" to the perfect level for him for optimum hearing. This can be a tricky process since it involves relying on a 3 year old for feedback on what sounds he can hear. With Jack, we do conditioned listening and when a sound is presented to him, he throws a ball in a bucket upon hearing the sound. He has gotten really good at this, and now gets m&m's as a reward for listening. He sat so patiently for his audiologist on Monday, for about 30 minutes, listening to the sounds she gave him and cooperatively throwing the balls in the bucket (and eating endless amounts of m&m's). She was able to pinpoint his thresholds on each electrode in both ears, a total of 44 electrodes. This is so important because we now know that Jack is hearing the soft speech sounds clearly, sounds like the letters 'p' and 't'. To sum up, she made small adjustments to his left ear and bigger ones to his right ear, and thinks that this should be his final "map" or setting.

The reason that I went on so much about his audiology appointment is because 2 days after it, Jack said the 't' sound for the first time in his life! I pointed out a picture of a star to him, and he clearly said "star" back to me! Typically, he would have said "saw", but this time he said the entire word. I'm pretty sure I scared him a bit with my excessive clapping and shrieks of excitement. And in speech a couple of days later he said the 'ch' sound which is a difficult sound to make. Another difficult sound to make is the 'sh' sound, but that is one of Jack's favorite to say. Way to go Jack!