Aural Rehabilitation and Development of Speech Perception Skills in Young Children with Profoundly Hearing Impairment

Rehabilitation of young children with hearing impairment can be defined as a teaching/learning process where the role of the clinician is to facilitate the acquisition of listening, speech and language in a normal developmental order. The young children with hearing impairment are helped by hearing aids and cochlear implants to learn language. Auditory (re)habilitation in young children with hearing impairment is to acquire auditory skills at four stages : sound detection, sound identification through imitation, sound discrimination, and comprehension. Without appropriate auditory training and early intervention, children with hearing impairment cannot develop spoken language. Speech acquisition is a perceptual as well as an oral process. To maximize the speech acquisition in children with hearing impairment, indepth understanding of the characteristics of the children, the parents' motivation and cooperation, a well-designed educational program, and the high competence of the health care professionals are important. Therefore, listening is not an isolated skill, and the auditory development in children with hearing impairment should be achieved in a comprehensive approach. Young children with hearing impairment need supports and guidance from health care professionals whose holistic approach balances auditory learning with the parallel development of the children's other learning processes.

Speech Analysis in Patients with Velopharyngeal Incompetence Following Surgical Correction

A total of 35 patients with velopharyngeal incompetence were treated by surgical correction from 1995 to 2001. Twenty-six patients underwent lateral port control superior based pharyngeal flap and 9 patients underwent sphincteric pharyngoplasty. Speech analysis and fluorolaryngo-graphy was performed preoperatively and postoperatively. The nasality of open vowel, round vowel and sentence and articulation accuracy in 26 patients who underwent the pharyngeal flap improved from 37.7+/-10.71%, 49.1+/-9.54%, 50.1+/-9.03% and 68.9+/-10.11% preoperatively to 20.4+/-9.77%, 25.4+/-10.11%, 38.5+/-9.34% and 80.1+/-6.47% postoperatively, and hypernasality and articulation accuracy improved significantly (p<0.05). In case of 9 patients who underwent sphincteric pharyngoplasty, results were from 41.2+/-11.27%, 42.4+/-17.04%, 53.8+/-7.63% and 72.3+/-10.87% preoperatively to 20.7+/-8.27%, 20.8+/-14.34%, 29.7+/- 11.47% and 80.7+/-12.47% postoperatively, and hypernasality improved significantly (p<0.05). As far as postoperative fluorolaryngography is concerned, the velopharyngeal space was closed in patients with postoperative normal range of nasality. In conclusion, these results suggest that patients with velopharyngeal incompetence will improve speech dysfunction effectively if is chosen appropriately either superior based pharyngeal flap or sphincteric pharyngoplasty.

Cognitive Ability in Total Deafness with K-WISC / 대한이비인후과학회지

The criteria of suitability for a cochlear implant has been extended postlingual deaf adult including prelingual deaf children in their difficulty with speech and vocabulary development. The cognitve ability of deaf students has been investigated in a deaf school using Kedi-WISC. The results are as follows; 1) The deaf students were not inferior in intelligence when compared with normal hearers, but the intelligence between deaf students and normal hearers was different in quality. 2) In subtest they made higher scores at object assembly, block design and coding in senior group 3) It is supposed for deaf student that performance under vision and memory is relatively excellent although concrete and abstract tasks is retarded. No emotional disordered cases is found in this study.