Building the Alphabetic Principle in Young Children who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing

This study examined the speech perception, speech, and language developmental progress of 25 children with hearing loss (mean Pure-Tone Average [PTA] 79.37 dB HL) in an auditory-verbal therapy program.Children were tested initially and then 21 months later on a battery of assessments.The speech and language results over time were compared with those for a control group of children with typical hearing who were matched for initial language age, receptive vocabulary, gender, and socioeconomic level.Speech perception scores for the children with hearing loss showed significant improvement (p < 0.05) for live-voice presentations, but not for recorded voice.For both groups there was significant improvement over 21 months in scores for auditory comprehension, oral expression, total language, and articulation of consonants