Auditory-verbal therapy

Auditory-verbal therapy is a method for teaching deaf children to and speak using their residual hearing in addition to the constant use of amplification devices such as hearing aids, FM devices, and cochlear implants. Auditory-verbal therapy emphasizes speech and listening.

Auditory verbal therapy enables deaf and hard of hearing children to participate more fully in mainstream school and hearing society. In 2006, Rhoades published an article looking at whether the Auditory Verbal approach was justified. Using Frattali’s system for weighing the strength of treatment evidence based on the degree of scientific rigour, she found 7 studies concerning the AV approach of class II level evidence. She concluded that even with the minimal number of studies, there was evidence "for the validity and effectiveness of the A-V intervention model". Following on from Rhoades’ work, Hogan et al. (2008; 2010) published outcomes for children in an AV programme which were essentially quasi-experimental studies in that the assessment tool used had been standardised on typically developing children and so a comparison could be drawn between the age equivalence scores obtained by the children on the study and their chronological or ‘hearing’ age. (The hearing age of a child is the duration of time since the child has had optimal access to sound.) In these studies, the average rate of language development increased significantly during the time on the programme compared to the average rate of language development prior to embarking on the programme. Dornan et al. (2009) reviewed the evidence for Auditory Verbal Therapy and concluded that while it was not possible to demonstrate a cause and effect relationship between the intervention and the outcome, increasing the strength of evidence for outcomes was vital. In 2010, Dornan et al. published a longitudinal study comparing the outcomes of 29 children enrolled on an AV programme with age-matched controls. They found AV to be an effective intervention.

First Voice (a membership body which represents organisations that provide listening and spoken language therapy in Australia and New Zealand) published a study in February 2015 based on information on more than 600 children with hearing loss. When listening and spoken language outcomes of children with a hearing loss were compared to those with typical hearing most children attending AVT had ‘scores within or above the average range for typical hearing children for language (74.4%-75.6%), vocabulary (79.6%) and speech performance (71.5%). When children with additional disabilities were removed from the analysis, the number of children within or above the average range for typical hearing children increased, except for speech performance (language performance=77.9%-80.2%; vocabulary performance= 83.1%; speech performance=73.1%).’ (First Voice, 2015 pp 5).

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