United States

In 1997, CityBridge partnered with Dr. John Niparko of the Listening Center (Department of Otolaryngology) of Johns Hopkins University Hospital. Dr. Niparko wanted to create a new rehabilitation protocol for young, deaf children who had received a cochlear implant. Much of childhood deafness results from damage to the hair cells of the inner ear. Those cells’ movement, in response to sound waves, stimulates the auditory nerve, whose signals are then interpreted as sound in the brain. The whole system works like a train on a track, and when the hair cells are damaged, a crucial section of “track” is gone. The sound wave stops cold.

The cochlear implant is an electrode surgically attached to the auditory nerve in order to bypass damaged hair cells. Paired with a hearing aid-type device worn outside the head, the implant translates ambient sound into electrical signals and delivers them directly to the auditory nerve.

Individuals who have previously had full hearing, and then become deaf, adjust quickly to sound from a cochlear implant. But if a child has been born deaf, and has had little or no exposure to language, the experience of turning on a new cochlear implant is overwhelming. Many children would turn off their implants in fright. Many others had trouble making sense of sound, grammatical structures, or separate English phonemes. Hopkins researchers sensed that the phonemic patterning that happened with babies’ early attempts at speech were crucial to building solid grammar, pronunciation, and speech. With CityBridge as collaborator, the Hopkins team set out to create a rehabilitation curriculum that would replicate the “missed” early speech patterning of young deaf children who had just received a cochlear implant.

The resulting curriculum, published in 1999, consisted of a series of videos, workbooks, and training materials for teachers, therapists, and parents of children with a cochlear implant. Cited as an invaluable step forward for post-implant rehabilitation, this curriculum, titled “Bringing Sound to Life,” was the first codification of the necessary steps for a formerly deaf child, post-implant, to acquire speech, correct pronunciation, and master English phonemes.

CityBridge later collaborated with Nancy Mellon, director of the Listening Center and founder of the River School in Washington, D.C., to adapt some of these same techniques for a pilot literacy project for young, low-income children at the Webb School in Northeast Washington. Using similar phonemically-based games as were first developed in the “Bringing Sound to Life” curriculum, Webb children in the pilot (three sessions per week for six months) demonstrated significant gains compared to their control peers in the same classroom. CityBridge has incorporated some of these lessons—such as the centrality of early phonemic patterning on later literacy—into the CityBridge Early Years Education Initiative.