Early Development of Children with Hearing Loss

Until recently, congenital hearing loss was a condition that generally curtailed a child's ability to develop the language of the ambient community and to succeed in mainstream educational settings. Two technological advances have radically changed that outlook for children with hearing loss: methods for screening hearing at birth and cochlear implants. This new book, based around a large-scale study, examines how closely the developmental trajectories of children with hearing loss matches those of children with normal hearing.

While the two changes described above have altered prognoses for children with hearing loss, the author also discusses results from relevant areas of psycholinguistic study where there has also been a shift in perspective among psycholinguists studying the processing of speech that could, and perhaps should, affect intervention.

The book unpacks many ideas that have been cornerstones of intervention for young children with hearing loss, and the source of much controversy. It comes at a time when there have been many developments regarding treatment options for children with hearing loss that are difficult to interpret within the context of traditional approaches.

Douglas L. Beck, AuD, speaks with Dr. Nittrouer about language development, sign language, adoption, cochlear implants, and her book, Early Development of Children with Hearing Loss in this interview in The Hearing Review. Read the article here.

• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 A Shared History: Putting This Book in Cultural Perspective
• Chapter 2 The Emergence of Language
• Chapter 3 Development of Children with Hearing Loss: State of Our Knowledge
• Chapter 4 Participants and Procedures: How Independent Sources of Variability Were Handled
• Chapter 5 Behavior, Personality, and Cognition
• Chapter 6 Basic Language Measures: Comprehension, Vocabulary, and Intelligibility
• Chapter 7 Language in the Real World: What We Learn From Natural Samples
• Chapter 8 Real-World Language: Developing Native Competencies
• Chapter 9 Treatment Effects
• Chapter 10 All About Parents
• Chapter 11 Putting It All Together: A Latent Measure of Language Acquisition
• Chapter 12 Considering the Past, Planning For the Future
• Appendix A Educational and Occupational Scales For Indexing Socio-Economic Status
• Appendix B: Decision Tree For Scoring Children’s Language Samples
• Appendix C: Communicative Acts Used For Scoring Children’s Language Samples
• Appendix D: Communication Acts Used For Scoring Parental Language Samples
• Appendix E: A Slightly Different Version of Figure 12-1
• Index