Early Speech Development of Babies with Hearing Loss

Abstract

Babies with hearing loss require early intervention and the fitting of appropriate amplification if the parents’ or caregivers’ wish is for the babies to develop speech and spoken language. The babies’ progress must be closely monitored to ensure they are acquiring speech and language at a good rate to enable them to catch up to their hearing peers’ speech and language skills once hearing loss is detected and amplification is provided. Until recently, assessments to monitor the progress of young children with hearing loss have tended to focus more on skills that develop around one year of age and later. There have been limited assessment tools for following progress at a young age, particularly for early speech development in the first year of a baby’s life. This thesis investigated a new assessment tool (the Infant Monitor of vocal Production (IMP)), and compared it to other more established tools (the Stark Assessment of Early Vocal Development – Revised (SAEVD-R) and the Rossetti Infant- Toddler Language Scale) to assess its clinical validity. The thesis investigated the differences in early speech development between babies with hearing loss (n = 12) and typically developing babies (n = 15) who were all under 12 months. The IMP Ceiling Score and Percentage of Robustness correlated significantly with the Rossetti Language Expression subtest, rs(19) = .546, p = .016, and rs(19) = .617, p = .005, respectively. Overall typically developing babies acquired early speech and language skills more quickly than the babies with hearing loss. Once the babies with hearing loss were adequately amplified they showed improvements in their scores. Further research is indicated to explore whether the babies with hearing loss continue to show improvements in their early speech and language scores.