Early intervention


Most children with bilateral severe hearing loss or deafness, are given birth by hearing parents that wish their child to be a piece of the hearing and speaking world. For these families, cochlear implants provide an evidenced, sure and effective option of treatment.
Children that have normal hearing develop the oral language with the hearing and the imitation of oral language of their environment. A child with hearing loss does not have this ability. Consequently they face difficulty in the hearing of language (receptive abilities) and difficulty in the growth of oral language (expressive abilities).
The on-time diagnosis of hearing loss, in combination with a suitable treatment, can improve the oral linguistic abilities of these children.
Early intervention in children with hearing loss offers them the best possible results in speech and language, because it allows normal developmental methods to be used, in normal time frame of growth.
For the rehabilitation of prelingual patients the addition of one more therapeutic phase was necessary, that of the preoperating speech therapy intervention.
The content of this phase is the awareness of visual and motor/tactile perception as well as the preparation and the judgement for the existence or not of various linguistic structures and perceptive abilities, quantitatively and qualitatively, so as for the sound to be transported in this ready environment later on.
It is the phase of speech therapy’s early intervention in infants and children before the cochlear implantation.