Wednesday, January 29, 2003

Monitor hearing closely in early years

The auditory system of infants is shaped dramatically during the first year of life, by experience with sound and most importantly by exposure to speech. Although infants can not produce recognizable words until 1 year of age, they have remarkable ability to distinguish among speech sounds, to recognize names of familiar objects, to interpret voice tone, and perform sophisticated auditory functions long before they produce speech.

The first year of life is a critical time for auditory experiences and the lack of auditory experiences can have profound detrimental effects. If an infant has hearing loss at birth then is the time to intervene as it will allow the child to develop close to normal academically, personally and socially.

Although it is not visible to observers, infants with hearing are learning to process speech and understand language and are quite linguistically sophisticated by 1 year of age. At the same time, the neurons in the auditory brainstem are maturing, and billions of major neural connections are being formed.

Hearing loss in newborn infants can go undetected until as late as 2 years of age without specialized testing. When hearing loss is detected in the new born period, infants can benefit from amplification (hearing aids) and intervention to facilitate speech and language development. All evidence regarding neural development supports such early intervention for maximum development of communication ability and hearing in infants.

Children with early hearing loss who are not identified and intervention does not occurred will suffer many undesirable effects such as lagging behind as many as several years academically, poor language development, poor speech production, and undeveloped social and personal skills. National Infant Hearing Screening parameters insist on identifying an infant with hearing loss before 3 months of age and the intervention before 6 months of age.

Andrew Waits

clinical audiologist