There is no question that children with hearing loss are achieving levels of spoken language mastery never before reached by most children with hearing loss. For example, half of all children with hearing loss read within normal limits for children with normal hearing. A encouraging as that is, it means that for half of the children with hearing loss, they are still falling below expectations. The testing on this project is meant to examine whether or not there are ways that we might tweak what we are currently providing by way of intervention to children with hearing loss to help move them still further ahead in their language skills.

Testing on this project is designed to see how children with hearing loss who have benefitted from the best treatment options currently available are faring as they progress through the elementary grades. All children participating were part of the first phase of this project in which we tested children between the ages of 12 and 48 months of age. These children, along with one parent each, are visiting Columbus, Ohio during each summer after completing kindergarten, second, and fourth grade to be tested on a variety of measures. Outcomes will help professionals identify any difficulties that children with hearing loss continue to encounter, even with current treatment options.

Testing looks at a variety of developmental outcomes:

Nonverbal cognitive development. Social skills. Psychosocial development. Adaptive functioning. Speech perception. Phonological awareness. Reading abilities.

Speech Intelligibility. Narrative skills. Expressive language skills. Auditory comprehension of language. Working memory for verbal material. Processing speed of verbal material.

This information should help audiologists, speech-language pathologists, and educators make decisions about what kinds of intervention strategies and accommodations best facilitate typical development for children with hearing loss in this new age of early intervention and high-tech prostheses.