I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey Through the Science of Sound and Language - Hardcover

Denworth, Lydia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525953795 ISBN 13: 9780525953791

Publisher: Dutton, 2014

Synopsis

An investigation into the science of hearing, child language acquisition, neuroplasticity, brain development, and Deaf culture. 

A mother notices her toddler is not learning to talk the way his brothers did… Is something wrong?  Her search for answers is a journey into the mysteries of the human brain.

Lydia Denworth’s third son, Alex, was nearly two when he was identified with significant hearing loss that was likely to get worse. Her sweet boy with the big brown eyes had probably never heard her lullabies.

Denworth knew the importance of enrichment to the developing brain but had never contemplated the opposite: Deprivation.  How would a child’s brain grow outside the world of sound most of us take for granted? How would he communicate?  Would he learn to read and write—weren’t phonics a key to literacy? How long did they have until Alex’s brain changed irrevocably? In her drive to understand the choices—starting with the angry debate between supporters of American Sign Language and the controversial but revolutionary cochlear implant—Denworth soon found that every decision carried weighty scientific, social and even political implications.  As she grappled with the complex collisions between the emerging field of brain plasticity, the possibilities of modern technology, and the changing culture of the Deaf community, she gained a new appreciation of the exquisite relationship between sound, language and learning.  It became clear that Alex’s ears—and indeed everyone’s—were just the beginning.

An acclaimed science journalist as well as a mother, Denworth interviewed the world’s experts on language development, inventors of ground-breaking technology, Deaf leaders, and neuroscientists at the frontiers of research.  She presents insights from studies of everything from at-risk kids in Head Start to noisy cocktail party conversation, from songbirds to signal processing, and from the invention of the telephone to sign language.

Weaving together tales from the centuries-long quest to develop the cochlear implant and simultaneous leaps in neuroscientific knowledge against a tumultuous backdrop of identity politics, I Can Hear You Whisper shows how sound sculpts our children’s brains and the life changing consequences of that delicate process. 

About this title

About the Author

LYDIA DENWORTH is a former Newsweek reporter, London bureau chief at People, and professor of journalism at Fordham. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Child, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and other publications. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

In this science-laced story about her youngest son, Alex, veteran journalist Denworth eloquently explains how hearing works and fails. After she and her doctors figure out that Alex is silent because he doesn’t know what people are saying, he gets a cochlear implant at age two, which turns out to be a miraculous device. Denworth weaves her son’s story throughout her easy-to-understand primer on how people hear, listen, speak, and read. Reporter that she is—having worked at Newsweek and People and published stories in the New York Times—Denworth interviews many top experts and cites the work of researchers past and present. Back in 1929, for example, a scientist named Harvey Fletcher wrote, The processes of speaking and hearing are very intimately related, so much so that I have often said that we speak with our ears. We can listen without speaking but cannot speak without listening. Think about it. An excellent book for anyone with deafness in the family or with a desire to better understand how people hear, why hearing loss occurs, and how it is treated. --Karen Springen

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525953795
• ISBN 13: 9780525953791
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400