I Can Hear You Whisper (36 page)

Comments that came from my interviews are indicated in the present tense (“says” rather than “said”). Those from other sources are cited below.

CHAPTER 1: THE COW AND THE RED BALLOON

For personal chapters, I relied on my journals, recollections of events, and files of reports about Alex from audiologists, doctors, speech therapists, and teachers. I also interviewed some of the professionals who have worked with Alex over the years.

David Kemp discovered
:
Information on otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) is available at http://www.asha.org//files/55/04/f5504/public/hearing/Otoacoustic-Emissions/. OAEs and other diagnostic hearing tests are also described in Debby Waldman with Jackson Roush,
Your Child's Hearing Loss: What Parents Need to Know
(New York: Perigee, 2005). An American Academy of Audiology interview with David Kemp is at http://www.audiology.org/news/Pages/20090106b.aspx. Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi Murkoff, and Sandee Hathaway, What to Expect the First Year (New York: Workman, 1996). [Latest edition published 2010.]

CHAPTER 2: A NEW WORLD

Two or three in a thousand
:
For statistics on hearing loss, I referred to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), at http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/Pages/quick.aspx; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), at http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/hearingloss/data.html; and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, at http://www.asha.org/aud/Facts-about-Pediatric-Hearing-Loss/.

Sam Supalla
:
In Carol Padden and Tom Humphries,
Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 15–16. This story was also recounted to me by Ted Supalla. Also in Padden and Humphries,
Deaf in America
:
“
For hearing people
”
a different center
, “
A Deaf couple
,”
THINK-HEARING
.

deaf community's pride
:
To read about identity and illness,
see chap. 1, “Son,” in
Andrew Solomon,
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).

You could be deaf or Deaf
:
There is a full discussion of terms used to describe hearing loss, varieties of hearing loss, and cultural terms in the first two chapters of Marc Marschark,
Raising and Educating a Deaf Child
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), and a thoughtful discussion on this subject in “Identity and the Power of Labels,” the first chapter of Irene W. Leigh,
A Lens on Deaf Identities
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). The National Association of the Deaf gives a full explanation of its views on labels at http://www.nad.org/issues/american-sign-language/community-and-culture-faq. See also AG Bell's listening andspokenlanguage.org.

a tribe in Namibia
:
See “Do You See What I See?” BBC Two
Horizon
, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14421303.

“
Deafness as such
”
:
From Oliver Sacks,
Seeing Voices
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 94.

“
Language really does
”
:
Paula Tallal's interview on Phonological Processing, with David Boulton, Children of the Code, at http://www.childrenofthecode .org/interviews/tallal.htm.

“equally suitable for making love or speeches”
:
Sacks,
Seeing Voices
, 101. For discussion of deaf educational underachievement, see Marschark,
Raising and Educating a Deaf Child
, 165; John B. Christiansen, Reflections:
My Life in the Deaf and Hearing Worlds
(Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2010) 214; Commission on Education of the Deaf,
Toward Equality: Education of the Deaf
, Report to the President and the Congress of the United States, 1988; Sue Archbold and Gerard M. O'Donoghue, “Education and Childhood Deafness: Changing Choices and New Challenges,” in John K. Niparko, ed.,
Cochlear Implants: Principles & Practices
, 2nd ed. (New York: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2009). For deaf reading levels, see Carol Bloomquist Traxler, “The Stanford Achievement Test, 9th Edition: National Norming and Performance Standards for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students,”
Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education
5 no. 4, (2000): 337–348; Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer, “Epilogue: What We Know, What We Don't Know, and What We Should Know,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language and Education
, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Deaf graduation and employment rates: Blanchfield BB, Feldman JJ, Dunbar JL, Gardner EN. The severely to profoundly hearing-impaired population in the United States: “Prevalence Estimates and Demographics,”
Journal of the American Academy of Audiology
(2001): 12:183–189. National Technical Institute for the Deaf Collaboratory on Economic, Demographic, and Policy Studies: http://www.ntid.rit.edu/research/collaboratory.

“
a
miracle of biblical proportions
”
:
Steve Parton, quoted in Edward Dolnick, “Deafness as Culture,”
Atlantic Monthly
, September 1993.

National Association of the Deaf . . . position on cochlear implants
:
NAD position papers, 1990, 2000. See also: John B. Christiansen and Irene W. Leigh,
Cochlear Implants in Children: Ethics and Choices
(Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 257.

“genocide” and “child abuse”
:
See Dolnick,
Atlantic Monthly
;
Andrew Solomon, “Defiantly Deaf,”
New York Times Magazine
, August 28, 1994.

CHAPTER 3: HOW LOUD IS A WHISPER?

“maniacal miniature golf course”
:
Diane Ackerman,
A Natural History of the Senses
(New York: Vintage, 1991), 177.

our keenest hearing
:
E. Bruce Goldstein,
Sensation and Perception
, 8th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010), 265; Thomas D. Rossing, F. Richard Moore, and Paul A. Wheeler,
The Science of Sound
,
3rd ed. (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2002),
335.

Prehistoric ears
:
Discussed in section on ear damage in Rossing et al.,
Science of Sound
, 722.

For sound waves, the mechanics of hearing, and decibel levels, see Rossing et al.,
Science of Sound
, chaps. 1 and 5; Goldstein, Sensation and Perception, 261–272; House Clinic, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hearing Loss (New York: Alpha Books, 2010), 10–13.

For sound versus vision, see Rossing et al.,
Science of Sound
, 79–80.

more going on than that
:
Daniel J. Levitin,
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
(New York: Dutton, 2006), 41–46.

For frequency of speech sounds/speech banana, see American Academy of Audiology table, “Audiogram of Familiar Sounds.”

For bone conduction, see Rossing et al.,
Science of Sound
, 85. ABR is described in Waldman and Roush,
Your Child's Hearing Loss,
34.

In one state's survey
:
Marschark,
Raising and Educating a Deaf Child
, 14–15, citing research by Christine Yoshinaga-Itano.

CHAPTER 4: A STREAM OF SOUND

nearly seven thousand languages
:
http://www.ethnologue.com/world.

Most begin to talk
:
See Charles Yang,
The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
(New York: Scribner, 2006), 2–3; and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek,
How Babies Talk: The Magic and Mystery of Language in the First Three Years of Life
(New York: Dutton, 1999).

“
doubtless the greatest intellectual feat
”
:
Leonard Bloomfield,
Language
(New York: Henry Holt, 1933).

From Saint Augustine to Charles Darwin
:
Alison Gopnik, Andrew N. Meltzoff, and Patricia K. Kuhl,
The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, and How Children Learn
(New York: Morrow, 1999), 98.

Chomsky disagreed
:
For Skinner versus Chomsky, see Yang,
Infinite Gift,
16–18.

Universal grammar explained
:
Yang,
Infinite Gift
, 8, 16–31; Gopnik et al.,
Scientist in the Crib
, 99–102.

Victor of Aveyron
:
Harlan Lane,
When The Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 122–132.

Genie
:
Susan Donaldson James, “Wild Child ‘Genie': A Tortured Life,” Associated Press, May 8, 2008, at http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/national_world&id=6130233; Gopnik et al.,
Scientist in the Crib,
192.

“
miniature languages
”
:
See Maryia Fedzechkina, T. Florian Jaeger, and Elissa L. Newport, “Language Learners Restructure Their Input to Facilitate Efficient Communication,”
PNAS
109 no. 44 (2012): 17897–17902; and Carla L. Hudson Kam and Elissa L. Newport, “Getting it right by getting it wrong: When learners change languages,”
Cognitive Psychology
59 no. 1 (2009): 30–66. For discussion of the “less is more” theory, see also Elissa L. Newport, “Maturational Constraints on Language Learning,”
Cognitive Science
14 no. 1 (1990): 11–28.

Hart and Risley
:
Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley,
Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children
(Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Publishing, 1995). Quotes from Risley come from an interview by David Boulton for Children of the Code, at http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/risley.htm.

a lively, ongoing debate
:
Interview with Elissa Newport. See also Elissa L. Newport, “Plus or Minus 30 Years in the Language Sciences,”
Topics in Cognitive Science
2 no. 3 (2010): 367–373; and Elissa L. Newport, “The Modularity Issue in Language Acquisition: A Rapprochement? Comments on Gallistel and Chomsky,”
Language Learning and Development
7 no. 4 (2011), 279–286.

“
nurture
is
our nature
”
:
Gopnik et al.,
Scientist in the Crib
, 8.

“
Children . . . are innovators
”
 . . . Songbirds interest linguists
:
Yang,
Infinite Gift,
4–5.

the somewhat methodical way babies focus
:
Interviews with Athena Vouloumanos and with Gina Lebedeva, director of Translation, Outreach, and Education, Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington (lab of Patricia Kuhl). See also: Judit Gervain, Iris Berent, and Janet F. Werker, “Binding at Birth: The Newborn Brain Detects Identity Relations and Sequential Position in Speech,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
24 no. 3 (2012): 564–574; Athena Vouloumanos and Janet F. Werker, “Listening to Language at Birth: Evidence for a Bias for Speech in Neonates,”
Developmental Science
10 no. 2 (2007): 159–171; Athena Vouloumanos and Janet F. Werker, “Tuned to the Signal: The Privileged Status of Speech for Young Infants,”
Developmental Science
7 no. 3 (2004): 270–276; Athena Vouloumanos et al., “Five-month-old infants' identification of the sources of vocalizations,”
PNAS
106 no. 44 (November 3, 2009): 18867–18872; Gopnik et al.,
Scientist in the Crib
, 106–110.

CHAPTER 5: “SOME MEANS OF INSTRUCTING”

My main sources on the early history of deaf education are Harlan Lane,
When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf
; David Wright,
Deafness
:
An Autobiography
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1993); and Carol Padden and Tom Humphries,
Deaf in America
, and their second book,
Inside Deaf Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Page references below as well as additional sources.

Abbé Charles-Michel de l'Epée
:
Quotes are from Lane,
When the Mind Hears
, 57–58. See also Padden and Humphries,
Deaf in America
, 27—29, and Wright,
Deafness
, 183.

“
It has come to symbolize”
:
Padden and Humphries,
Deaf in America
, 29.

Samuel Johnson
:
From
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
, quoted in Wright,
Deafness
, 179.

indistinguishable from that of the mentally ill
:
Wright,
Deafness
, ix.

Ponce de Léon
:
Ibid., 164–168, and Lane,
When the Mind Hears
, 90–94. Pedro de Velasco is quoted in both books. I have used the translation from Wright.