We spent the last few days at the University of Wisconsin's Binaural Hearing and Speech Lab. This was our second visit and it's always eye-opening to understand how Lily is hearing.
Over 2.5 days, Lily participated in a variety of hearing games including: identifying words and sounds in noise and quiet from various directions, language comprehension, speech perception and production, and non-verbal IQ. These games were broken up with lots of breaks, stickers, contests and prizes which were real drivers for Lily.
The researchers that performed the tests were wonderful as well. They were all women working as professors at the University or on their undergrad, graduate and post doc degrees in speech or audiology. And all were focused on careers with CI kids. Wonderful to see the future of this emerging industry. Thanks to Shelly, Christie, Kristie, Shelby, Yi, Sara and Sara for all your great work.
Our observations of the research are that nosie significantly impacts kids' hearing, localization is hard for CI kids and Lily is doing fabulous with her speech, language and listening. Lily's actual results will come in a month or so.
Here are some pictures of our experience. We also made stops at the Madison Children's Museum, the free Madison Zoo and State Street (downtown hotspots).
For every family that can make a trip to participate in this research, we highly recommend it. Check out the UW website for more information.
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