Lending an ear
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| Trent works on building his vocabulary at the TCU Listening and Spoken Language Summer Institute. |
Fort Worth, TX
1/11/2010
By Rick Waters '95
Trent works on building his vocabulary at the TCU Listening and Spoken Language Summer Institute.
A red-handled screwdriver, a silver-topped hammer and a push-button flashlight were laid out enticingly on the table in front of 5-year-old Trent.
The stranger had pulled the toy tools out a mysterious box behind the table, along with a small fireman figurine and a girl dressed in overalls. What else was in there?
The hammer. Trent wanted it. He reached. But a hand firmly guided him back in his seat.
“Trent, we have to listen first,” his mother said. Listening is the hard part, but he could do it.
“Who wants the hammer?” the stranger asked, shielding her lips from Trent’s view. “She wants the hammer.”
With a glance toward his mom, the boy slowly grasped the handle. Then with another peek over, just for reassurance, he confidently thrust the object toward the toy girl sitting on the left side of the table.
His mom and the strangers clapped. Trent bit his lip. He had heard.
Deaf since birth, Trent has been hearing with digital hearing aids since before toddlerhood, and auditory-verbal therapy sessions, like the one that focused on pronoun use, help him and his mom practice listening and talking rather than using sign language or lip-reading. “All we’ve ever wanted for him is to be part of the normal, hearing world around him,” his mom Courtney says.
Thanks to recent technological advances in hearing aids and cochlear implants, Trent is part of a new population of children, who, in spite of hearing loss, are learning to listen at the very time that auditory pathways are developing in their brains.
“That means his development is very close to the same as a child with no hearing loss,” said Helen Morrison, associate professor in communication science and disorders. “It’s really a wonderful time in the history of services for children with hearing loss and their families. The old paradigm was to learn to sign and deal with it. That’s no longer the case. This is a solvable problem with technology.”
Newborn hearing screening is mandated in 47 states, and infants as young as a few weeks old are now being fitted with digital hearing aids within the first weeks of life. Eighty to 90 percent of children who are born with severe to profound hearing loss will receive cochlear implants.
The best news: Infants receiving appropriate early intervention within the first year of life have been shown to acquire language at levels on par with their peers and are able to communicate with speech.
While these advancements are encouraging, training for deaf education, speech pathology and audiology is lagging behind, Morrison says. Teachers and clinicians need to learn new methods that facilitate listening and talking skills, rather than visual sign systems.
“We who are professionals are seeing this sea change in the population that we are serving, and we need to change our techniques because our children can hear now,” she said. “Around the world, we have a need to retool and reskill.”
In June, Communication Sciences and Disorders created the TCU Listening and Spoken Language Institute to offer training in audio-verbal methods for deaf educators, speech pathologists and audiologists. Established with funds from the Texas Education Agency, the week-long seminar welcomed 51 professionals from four countries to campus, plus another 76 watching via videoconferencing from six sites around Texas, to hear a series of lectures from 13 visiting experts, which came from Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, UT-Dallas Cochlear Implant Center, Hearing School of the Southwest, Center for Hearing and Speech in Houston and Hearts for Hearing in Oklahoma City.
The following week, 20 attendees were selected to participate in a five-day practicum in audio-verbal therapy methods at the Miller Speech and Hearing Clinic.
Working in pairs, they prepare a series of hour-long therapy sessions for children and their parents. A visiting expert takes notes in the corner of the room and offers coaching as the session progresses. Midway through the session, the coach leaves and another one comes in.
“So by the end of the hour, our participants are practicing these techniques and getting feedback from two different coaches,” Morrison said.
It’s rigorous. Participants prepared as many as two sessions per day. By the end of the week, they practiced therapy techniques with a half-dozen families and received evaluations from more than 10 coaches.
“We go to grad school to learn how to work with kids, but one of the new aspects of auditory-verbal therapy is that we have to know how to work with the parents,” said participant Paige Ponthier ’04 (’06 MS), a speech pathologist at Cook Children’s Medical Center. “We see the child one hour a week, but they’re with them 24 hours a day. So the focus is really on training the parent as much as working with the child.”
Ninety-five percent of deaf children come from hearing families, and many with infants and toddlers still talk too loud to their children, distorting how language should sound.
“The mentors have been amazing in how they have shown different ways to draw reactions out of the kids or give instructions to parents,” Ponthier said. “I’m going to use my hands more, use more gesturing. The most important thing is to have fun. If it looks like I am having fun, they are likely to also.”
Christine Evans ’04 (’07 MS), who worked with Trent during the week, said she plans to be more play-based at her audiology practice in Richmond, Va.
“I learned to be more natural with them, and I will expect a lot more from my kids,” she said. “I’ve learned that whatever you ask of them, they’ll do. It was really gratifying to hear the coaches suggest a couple of tweaks and then applying it and watching it work. Seeing the child be more successful is a real positive experience.”
On the Web: www.csd.tcu.edu. To see a video, click here.
Media contact:
Shawn Kornegay
817-257-5061
s.kornegay@tcu.edu
