Auditory-Verbal Therapy

Introduction

In the article, “Is Auditory-Verbal Therapy Effective for Children with Hearing Loss?” a multi-disciplinary team, Dornan et al. (2010), sought to design and perform a longitudinal study that explores whether auditory-verbal therapy (AVT) is effective in treating children with hearing loss especially in regard to academic success. The team cites several articles that show both positive and negative empirical evidence for AVT longitudinally; however they state that these studies were performed without consistent procedures or appropriate standardization and without control groups. The researchers sought evidence of whether AVT showed promising outcomes in five parameters over 50 months. The five parameters were listening, spoken language, reading, mathematics, and self-esteem.

Hypothesis

Dornan et al. (2010) posited that if a well-structured longitudinal study is performed on children with hearing loss being treated with AVT, the outcome will support the positive outcomes previously researched.

Method

The study was designed with two matched groups: an AVT group and a typically hearing (TH) group. The participant groups were matched by the following parameters: “total language, receptive vocabulary, gender, and socioeconomic level (as measured by the education level of the head of the household)” (Dornan, Hickson, Murdoch, Houston, & Constantinescu, 2010) The matching process ended in 19 matched participants in each group. It was noted that chronological age was not matched due to the rationale that a typical hearing child may have more advanced language development than a hearing impaired peer. However, participants were chosen from households only with the highest level of education achieved by t...

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... explored further. I thoroughly agree that the socioeconomic status restrictions must be widened for future research, as we have learned in so many of our classes and texts that higher socioeconomic status generally leads to lower risk of developmental delay and less “word-gap” as Dr. Stiegler would say. Children from a higher socioeconomic class, especially where parents have had access to higher education, tend to have more exposure to a variety of vocabulary usually resulting in a broader mental lexicon. I would like to see more research into areas (such as ours) where most children get some early intervention, but the bulk of services they receive are in public schooling.

References

Dornan, D., Hickson, L., Murdoch, B., Houston, T., & Constantinescu, G. (2010). Is Auditory-Verbal Therapy Effective for Children with Hearing Loss? The Volta Review, 361-387.