Hearing and Kids

I just attended the American Academy of Audiology conference in Columbus Ohio. While I do not like motivational speakers as a rule I did attend this year and was impressed. (And it was a good thing I did attend because I was surprised with the Presidential Award for service to the Academy and to the profession of Audiology. Very nice

Today’s blog is written by my friend and colleague, Andrea Warner-Cyz. Dr. Andrea Warner-Czyz, Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Dallas, investigates communication and quality of life in children with hearing loss using cochlear implants (CIs). Her research focuses on risk and protective factors that underlie variability in speech, language, and hearing skills, and how these factors affect

Until the last 15 or 20 years there has been a significant change in the way unilateral hearing loss has been viewed. Until recently audiologists and ENT’s assumed that a unilateral hearing loss (UHL) did not cause any language or learning problems. We now know that unilateral hearing loss causes significant problems. Cheryl Deconde Johnson has demonstrated the socio-emotional aspects

I have had three upsetting experiences in the last few weeks about pediatric audiology. All involved incompetence. I will confess right from the start that I am not tolerant of incompetence. If you ask people who have worked with me they will confirm this. When it comes to a child’s future, incompetence seems unacceptable.   Pediatric Audiology Requires Competence  

When I started in this field (in the age of the Dinosaur) the viewpoint was that we should tell bilingual parents that they needed to talk to their children with hearing loss in English because they would be going to schools which used English. In retrospect I cannot imagine what we were thinking. Parents were being asked to speak to

I was cleaning up my enormous pile of journals this week found some wonderful articles that have useful information. One was an article Reading Aloud At Home by Ellie White and Jenna Voss published in the Volta Review in September of 2017. A lot of the information in this blog comes from that article. We have heard lots and lots

I have been feeling for awhile that I am not hearing well. I went for an evaluation and, I was right. Speech perception testing confirmed what I suspected. While I did fine at normal conversation, my speech perception for soft speech was poor at 56%. Hmmm. I tried new hearing aids and when I got retested with the new aids

In the last few months I had questions from three different people asking what I thought about children changing their hearing aids when they get to school – listening with different equipment at home and at school. This can be a critical issue.   Why would we consider having children change technology when they get to school? It is critical

Violet’s Story   Violet’s story is published by Auditory Verbal UK (www.avuk.org) and written by Frances Clark who is a Listening and Spoken Language Specialist.. It is the story about a little girl is born with normal hearing but looses hearing at age 4. She is confused and doesn’t understand what is happening to her. Her parents are concerned because

Is the child hearing normal conversation?   If a child has good speech perception at normal conversational levels (45-50 dBHL) than we expect the child will hear well when 3-6 feet from the person who is speaking and when it is quiet. If she cannot hear well when close to the talker she will have problems learning. Children who cannot