Aural habilitation (AH) therapy is provided to children with varying degrees of hearing loss.
These children are fitted with hearings aids, cochlear implants, or bone-anchored hearing aids (BAHA). AH teaches children and and their families strategies and techniques to help their child develop communication skills through listening. Listening must be taught to children with hearing loss. The therapy includes helping children develop listening and language skills, improve speech, support communication and learn how to manage their hearing devices.
At Your Speech Path, LLC, knowledge of spoken language as well as American Sign Language is provided. All options are discussed with families and the appropriate treatment method will be chosen based on family preference.
Teaching a child to listen can be difficult. It is a skill the hearing community takes for granted, but for a child with hearing loss, it can be an exhausting, challenging task. In an aural habilitative treatment session, you can expect a Ling-6 Listening Check (oo, ee, ah, mm, ss, sh) to identify if your child can hear different frequencies across the audiogram. An audiogram is a graphical representation of what your child can hear. Your child will be taught to identify (“I hear something”), discriminate (“dog and dig sound different”), identify (“you said dog!”), and comprehend (“You said the dog is loud!”).
Below is the speech banana, in which the sounds of the English language are marked on an audiogram. When outlined, the sounds reflect that of a banana! You can see the decibel and hertz range of each sound. if your child has any degree of hearing loss, they will have difficulty with some, if not all, of these sounds.
