Aural Habilitation and Rehabilitation

Study Notes

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.

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 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

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.

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

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.

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.