Children and Hearing
The importance of Hearing
| The ability to hear is vital to a child’s development. Hearing makes it possible for a child to learn to recognize voices, imitate sounds and develop language. Hearing also helps children to pick up dangerous signals, to communicate and to develop social skills. It plays a vital role in forming a child’s personality and behaviour. If hearing loss is not diagnosed and treated at an early stage, it can have a significant negative impact on the child’s development. It is therefore important that the hearing losses are identified as early as possible. Significant delay in speech and language development can be avoided if amplification is provided at an early stage. The realization that a child has a hearing loss can be too traumetic to a parent, there is so much information to take in, and so many questions to be asked and decision to be made. So it is important
for the parents to have a positive attitude and
be well informed in order to provide the best possible conditions to their child. |
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Signs of Hearing Loss
- Failure to startle to loud sounds.
- Inability to locate source of sound e.g. turning the head towards the person speaking. The children with normal hearing will usually try and locate source around the age of 5 – 6 months.
- Generally requiring louder sound level in order to function – sitting too close to the TV turning up the volume, frequently asking ‘what’when spoken to, not responding when called.
- Babbling ceases or changes to more high pitched screaming sounds at the age of around 6 – 8 months
- Lack of normal response to sounds and no response to his or her name
around the age of 6 months.
- Failure for babbling to evolve into recognizable speech sounds during the child’s second year of life.
- Failure to respond to simple commands such as “bring daddy the ball” by around the age of one year, unless the child is looking directly at you and seeing your body movements. With drawing from social contact and perhaps acting out aggressively. This indicates frustration because of constant misunderstanding, resulting from hearing loss.
- Frequently misunderstanding spoken directions
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Milestones for Hearing Development
It is very difficult to define normal hearing development. Each individual
develops in his own way and at his own pace. The milestones describe below are therefore only to be considered as general guidelines.
Prenatal Stimulation
The human foetus possesses rudimentary hearing from 20 weeks of gestation. The hearing will develop and mature during the later part of gestation. Foetus is able to hear the sounds from outside the mothers body although it can hear low frequency sounds much better then high frequency sounds. |
Zero ---- 4 Months
Startle by loud and sudden sounds, begins to localize sounds with eyes or head movement
3 – 6 Months
Shows interest in different sounds experiments with making his own sounds.
6 – 12 Months
Babbles. Begins to understand simple words such as “Mummy and Bye Bye.”
12 – 18 Months
Words begin to form from the babbles. Can use about 20 words and understands about 50 words.
2 Years
Can usually speak simple sentences using a vocabulary about 200 to 300 words. Enjoys being read to and can identify and name many things in picture book.
3 – 4 Years
Uses words and sentences to express needs and feelings. Vocabulary, pronunciation and understanding improve markedly during these years.
In order to give to the child optimum stimulation, amplification should be provided soon after the diagnosis. Of course amplification does not reverse the hearing loss, but enables the child to hear sounds that otherwise would be too soft or not audible at
all
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