The University of Miami’s Debbie School, in collaboration with the Dade County, Florida, Public Schools, runs a program in deaf education. This program educates via simultaneous total communication, whereby children are taught in both American Sign Language and spoken language (an added complication is that some students come from English–Spanish homes). This program is specially structured to facilitate children’s use of devices that provide some of the information that they receive neither through their compromised auditory systems nor through lipreading.

These devices come in two flavors: Cochlear implants are surgically inserted into the inner ear. They transduce acoustic stimuli into electrical stimuli, in order to mimic the function of an intact inner ear. Tactual vocoders are typically worn on a belt across the stomach (at least for young children). They transduce acoustic stimuli into vibrotactile stimuli. High-frequency sounds cause vibrators on one end of the belt to vibrate, and low-frequency sounds cause vibrators on the opposite end of the belt to vibrate.

I an involved in a longitudinal study to evaluate the effectiveness of these artificial hearing devices for the purposes of speech perception and speech production.

And, yes, that is a picture of my ear (one of them, at least). (Want to see a a student’s conception of what my whole head looks like?)