Aural Habilitation and Rehabilitation

Aural Habilitation and Rehabilitation

• Aural habilitation helps deaf and hard-of-hearing children develop listening skills to use hearing devices and develop spoken language.
• Auditory access is crucial for developing spoken language.
• The brain reorganizes when deprived of auditory stimulation, other senses may take over the auditory cortex's role.
• Hearing devices are crucial to give the auditory cortex access.
• Auditory neural sensory deprivation is eliminated by providing auditory stimulation.
• Auditory pathways are stimulated for cognitive development.
• Children's auditory brains need access, stimulation, and development to use spoken language.
• Successful technology fitting eliminates auditory neural sensory deprivation and provides auditory information to the brain.
• Hearing devices must access the full frequency range in a soft enough level.
• Children benefit from multiple listening exposures and auditory practice.
• Age of intervention and pre/post-lingual deafness impact auditory brain development.
• 46 million words are heard by age 4.

Developing an Auditory Brain

• Auditory brain development requires auditory stimulation and access to information.
• Early intervention to help children catch up on missed listening time.
• Early intervention has a positive effect on language, achievement, and societal function.
• Neural plasticity in the brain is the principle behind this concept where the brain adapts to environmental factors.
• 10,000 hours of practice is required to master a skill.

Anticipatory Counseling

• Anticipatory counseling provides realistic expectations of what auditory development might look like in different situations.
• Evaluate the expected outcomes for children with hearing loss.
• Assess intrinsic and extrinsic factors.
• Intrinsic factors include age of amplification, pre/postlingual deafness and medical conditions
• Extrinsic factors include child behavior, compliance, support services, and family environment

AVT Session

• The AVT session consists of functional auditory, listening, language, and cognitive development.
• The use of controlled sounds is crucial and should be emphasized during practice.

Purposed Play

• Using play to facilitate auditory skills development is efficient as it is intrinsically motivating.
• Play should be targeted for appropriate auditory skills and the child's development level, age, and sensory needs.
• Activities are geared toward communication development.
• The goal of purposeful play sessions is to identify areas needing improvement and appropriate strategies to help a child develop auditory skills.

Auditory Distractions

• Auditory distractions need to be minimal to provide a conducive learning environment.
• Parents coaching should draw attention to environmental sounds for further auditory stimulation.

Language and Input

• Simplified, rather than telegraphic language, is better for providing input.
• Use of clear, simple language that mirrors the child's developmental level.

Developing Auditory Skills

• Detect, discriminate, identify, and comprehend sounds are different steps towards having a complete auditory experience.
• Different words can have similar auditory patterns and hearing aids need to be checked for efficiency.

Learning to Listen to Sounds

• Repetition of sounds is important for children's learning and should be used during learning experiences.
• Songs and nursery rhymes are good for auditory practice and make auditory experiences fun.

Stages of Play

• Children go through different stages of pretend play according to their age.