Hearing and Kids

I have been teaching some online courses in Australia and Singapore this last week. I have been talking about the Medial Consonant Test, developed by Rich Tyler at the University of Iowa in the early days of cochlear implants. At that time, candidates for implantation were adults who had long term profound hearing loss. The test was developed to help

There has been a lot of research over the years about the relationship of hours of use of speech perception scores and hours of use of hearing aids and cochlear implants. Now we have some more data. It confirms that longer wear time is critical. Work by the Boy’s Town group has shown that children who wear hearing aids 10

Everyone with hearing loss or who works with children with hearing loss is aware that the mask problem during this pandemic is a nightmare. No matter how good you are at hearing with technology, masks are a problem. They muffle the speech signal and they eliminate the possibility of lipreading. Anyone with hearing loss has difficulty managing communicating with people

Anyone who works with children with hearing loss should be a member of the AG Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. This is perhaps my favorite meeting to attend. AG Bell is a group that has as members audiologists, speech language pathologists, listening and spoken language specialists, teaches of the deaf and most important, families of children

I just read an article about using speech perception testing to validate hearing aid outcomes for adults. The article has a large box on the front page which says that it is not customary to do speech perception testing unless a patient is struggling enough to be considered for a cochlear implant. The author, Dr. Anna L. Mc Craney, is

One of my old babies has been a social worker in a large hospital for about 15 years. She has been doing discharge planning for patients leaving the hospital. She uses a cochlear implant and communicates extremely well. She does so well that people don’t even know that she has a hearing loss. At least, until now. While she has

A colleague recently asked me how many earmolds a baby was likely to need from the time hearing loss is identified until they are five. He is an adult audiologist and had been surprised when someone told him it could be as many as 32. It is a good question and one  that it helps to consider.  So how many

What can parents and clinicians do to check how well children are hearing, now that we can’t easily get in to see the audiologist? First, we need to be sure we are monitoring every child’s hearing. It is not a good idea to assume that, because a child was hearing well two months ago, that they will be hearing well

Being stuck at home, while we know it is essential, can be difficult. Kids are bored missing activity and friends, adults have work to do other than entertaining kids etc. But there are things we can do to keep kids entertained, and to help accomplish necessary activities.   No matter the child’s age, we can work on language by doing

This is a terrible time for everyone trying to managing during this crisis. But, what can we do to help kids with hearing loss manage?   Issue 1 – understanding when people are wearing masks   A friend of mine with severe hearing loss posted that she is having a difficult time managing because everyone is wearing masks. She needs