The impact of hearing loss on the early development of a child's language, cognition, and social- emotional competence can be pervasive. When a child has a hearing impairment of early onset, even of a relatively mild degree, the development of these skills is often delayed. Such delays adversely affect communicative, academic, and social success, which at a later age limit vocational choices.
A hearing loss, first and foremost, interferes with a child's detection and recognition of speech. In the case of a sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL), it may both filter and distort sound, or in the case of a conductive loss, it may cause fluctuating hearing levels. In either condition, the development of auditory skills that are prerequisite to the development of receptive and expressive language skills, as well as speech intelligibility, are delayed. Such auditory skills include detection, discrimination, recognition, comprehension, and attention. In turn, a delay in the early development of auditory skills caused by a hearing loss negatively impacts a child's ability to learn and use an auditory–oral language system.
The filtering effects of a hearing loss, coupled with immature auditory skills caused by hearing impairment, typically impact the development of oral language in all domains. These domains are classified as form (syntax), or the rules of language, content (semantics), or the meaning of words, and use (pragmatics), or the use of language in social contexts. At the infant, toddler, and preschool levels, a delay in any of these domains causes comprehension, expressive communication, and learning problems. For school-aged children, learning problems related to hearing loss typically manifest as poor performance in language-based subjects, class tests, class participation, and verbal interaction with peers and teachers. When summed, the impact of these difficulties leads to reduced academic achievement and often to school failure, especially in the lower grades. Until a child learns to read for new information, most classroom learning is through the auditory channel.
francis1897 answered the question on March 13, 2023 at 06:04