Aural habilitation in sever to profound hearing impaired children below 2 years old

Abstract

Background: Education of deaf children began in Europe more than four centuries ago Modern aural habilitation with emphasis on hearing dates back to the last two decades. In Iran Baghcheban began deaf education 80 years ago by sign language but new methods of aural habilitation have been used in the last decade presently, aural habilitation is being done in sporadic nonorganized style. In fact we’d like to find that do hard of hearing children achieve oral communication, and whether this achievement is equal among them or not. The other question is that does oral communication development in these children comparable with normal hearing children?
Methods: As newborn hearing screening was not being done in our country, the number of hearing impaired children who were detected below 2 years old was very limited, so randomized sampling was not possible. This research was designed as a semi-experimental prospective survey on 9 severe to profound hearing impaired infants below 2 years old during 2000-2004. They were under aural habilitation for 2.5-3 years. Their auditory speech and language development were assessed by data of therapist reports, video tape and recording tapes every 3-6 months. Their speech were analyzed and mid length utterance was determined in each case in compare with normal hearing children in the same age.
Findings: Our experiments indicated that these children achieve oral communication but not in the same level. Eight children achieved acceptable oral communication. One case has favorable auditory development, but his speech is relatively poor. According to our study MLUw was 3.11 ( normal 4), MLUm 3.66 (normal 7.5). It shows that hearing impaired children achieved comparable MLUw but not MLUm .
Conclusions: Timely aural habilitation result in aural communication development but this is affected by several factors. These factors can be divided into general and specific factors, and both of them should be considered in new design of aural habilitation centers.