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"At first we were, of course, completely blown away and shocked," Taylor's mother, Anna Sharp, said. "But at the same token, I mean a lot of children ... can fail the newborn screening in the hospital the first time they do it, and then they'll redo it and they'll pass ... and it can be like a false positive. ... We really didn't start freaking out until the follow-up appointments; he was still failing."
At 3 months old, Taylor got hearing aids for both ears, but he still wasn't responding well to sound. So just before he turned 1, he went through surgery to get a cochlear implant for his right ear, the worse of his two ears.
A cochlear implant is a small, electronic device surgically placed under the skin behind the ear of a patient who is either deaf or severely hard of hearing. The device is made up of several parts, including a microphone, a speech processor, a transmitter, a receiver, a stimulator and electrodes that all work together to stimulate the auditory nerve and provide a sense of sound for the patient.
Sharp said the first implant made a huge difference for Taylor. And almost two years after getting the first implant, Taylor got a second one for his left ear. The next step for Taylor was learningto communicate verbally. His parents enrolled him in a special school in Savannah for hearing-impaired children.
They heard about Sound Start from a friend of a friend, and Sharp said the school has made a huge difference in Taylor's life since he started there almost a year ago. Now instead of just pointing at things and whining, he uses words to try to verbalize his needs. And Sharp said Taylor speaks a lot more than his older brother did at the same age.
A program of the nonprofit Savannah Speech & Hearing Center, Sound Start offers the only private auditory/oral program for hearing-impaired children in the area. The program opened in 2007 and is intended for children between the ages of 2 and 6 years old. The auditory/oral approach offers children a chance to learn to communicate without the use of sign language. They are instead taught to listen, speak and understand spoken language.
In addition to the usual preschool education, Taylor and the other children at Sound Start go through an intense program that concentrates on linguistics and teaches them to communicate verbally without the use of lip reading or sign language. He also receives one-on-one speech therapy at the school.
"It's made a tremendous difference," Sharp said about Taylor attending the school. "I don't think he would be as verbal as he is without that intense therapy."
Sharp said if it were not for Sound Start, her son would probably just have speech therapy, and she would work with him at home, but he wouldn't have interaction with other students and his education wouldn't be as intense. Her plan is for him to be able to attend mainstream kindergarten.
And that's also the goal of Sound Start, according to speech therapist and program director Laurie Hill.
"It's basically important for those families that make the decision that they want their child to be oral, which means they are not going to use sign language, to be able to listen and talk and communicate," Hill said.
While not all hearing-impaired children need cochlear implants, Hill said all eight children currently at the school have implants. She said any hearing-impaired child is welcome to use the auditory/oral method they use at Sound Start, but the staff there evaluates children prior to accepting them into the program.
"I have deaf children that can hear better than me," Hill said. "And that's remarkable with the technology that's available. But it takes a lot of work."
Hill said the human brain doesn't interpret a cochlear implant's electronic signals as speech, so the children have to learn to hear the computer "speech" and recognize it as human speech.
"It's life changing for not only the children but for the families themselves because they don't have the expectations of what their child can do," Hill said about Sound Start. "The doors open up. ... They can do anything."
