Aural Rehabilitation for School Age Children

Aural Rehabilitation for School-Age Children

• Focus of services: structured auditory training, improving challenging language skills, social inclusion, and enhancing educational outcomes
• Services delivery:
  • Direct services: pull-out, push-in, small group
  • Indirect services: consultation, observation

Amplification System

• Assume responsibility of amplification system:
  • Wear and keep it on during waking hours
  • Indicate when cochlear implant is not functioning properly
  • Become familiar with audiogram and programming process

Structured Auditory Training

• Goals:
  • Detection: detecting non-linguistic and linguistic sounds, sound onset, and termination
  • Patterning: associating specific familiar sounds with objects in the environment
  • Discrimination: suprasegmental (vocal intensity, duration, rate, pitch) and segmental (vowels, consonants)
  • Identification: comprehension of common expressions, following directions, and making identifications
  • Comprehension: identifying true and false statements, following an illustrated story, and answering questions

Resources for Activities

• Online resources: games to help children detect sounds, apps for auditory processing and sound discrimination

Auditory Strategies

• Acoustic Highlighting: emphasizing specific sounds or words to make them stand out
  • Adding emphasis to important words by changing tone of voice
  • Adding a sing-song quality to voice
  • Saying the word slightly louder or softer than the rest
  • Pausing before saying the key word
• Auditory Bombardment: focused auditory stimulation
• Auditory Sandwich: listening or auditory signal with context necessary for understanding

Strategies to Improve Auditory Access in Educational Settings

• FM system: a special wireless device that helps people hear better in noisy listening situations
• Other strategies: read table on page 152 of the book

Speech and Language Therapy for Children with Hearing Loss

• Assessment: norm-referenced, criterion-referenced, and observational tests
• Program direction: reducing the use of norm-referenced tests, focusing on challenging language skills
• Goals: vocabulary expansion, increasing MLU, increasing use of variety of sentence structures, and improving phonological awareness skills

Speech Perception vs. Speech Production

• Speech perception: associated with detection, discrimination, identification, and comprehension of speech
• Speech production: development, intelligibility, and use of speech at home and school

Speech Intelligibility Issues in Hearing Impaired Children

• Acquiring fricatives and high-pitch sounds, and intonational changes
• Resolving speech intelligibility challenges: working on speech sounds, teaching language strategies, and encouraging speech that fits language needs

Planning Intervention

• Basic information needed: broad areas targeted, contexts, and end-of-treatment goals
• EBP approach to intervention: ongoing, dynamic clinical decision-making process

Intervention Goals

• Long-term goals: broad changes in communicative behavior to be achieved within a projected period
• Short-term goals: building blocks towards achieving long-term goals, containing "do" statements, context, and criterion

Goal Attack Strategies

• Vertical: targeting one goal at a time until the desired level of performance is reached
• Horizontal: targeting multiple goals simultaneously
• Cyclical: targeting each goal for a specific amount of time, then switching to the next goal

This quiz focuses on the differences in aural rehabilitation approaches for toddlers and school age children, including fitting with amplification systems, structured auditory training, and improving language skills.