Helping Alexa learn to talk

I’ll never forget the feeling I had when Alexa made babbling sounds as a baby. In that moment I realised that that could be the only noise she could make, and even though it wasn’t consistent like a hearing child, it was still a milestone that she had hit.

My friends’ children born at the same sort of time were just learning their first words, while I was teaching Alexa her first sign. Their kids learnt ‘mama’ or ‘dada’ so quickly and it took us double the time to teach Alexa ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in sign language.

When we started our cochlear implant journey, we were told that, due to the level of Alexa’s hearing loss, we shouldn’t expect her to talk. She might just use sign at all times. Luckily by this point, Alexa’s signing was coming on slowly but surely. She’d learnt all the animal signs, as well as the signs she needed to let us know what she wanted.

Then we started our Auditory Brainstem Implant (ABI) journey, which led us to now. Alexa is still signing but she’s also talking... That’s right she’s TALKING! One afternoon she sat on my lap and I thought I’d try something new now I knew she was definitely hearing me. So I put her hand up towards my mouth and started making noises, and she copied. I did it again and she copied my mouth movements and tried copying the sounds. After a few days, she’d perfected what she had to do.

We have a long way to go before she will be able to string a sentence together, but she’s now able to make the ‘mmm’, ‘ooo’, ‘nnn’ and ‘sss’ sounds. She’s also perfected the word ‘mum’ which, of course, is emotional for me, and Alexa’s dad is now constantly walking around going ‘dadadada’! Of course, Lex isn’t paying any attention to this, she just looks at him and laughs! What methods did you use to help your child to talk? I’d be so grateful for some more tips and tricks!