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Is the main difference between Auditory-Verbal therapy and other types of therapy the fact that in Auditory-Verbal therapy the mouth is covered?
 Auditory-Verbal therapy's goal is to maximize the child's ability to use his or her residual hearing. Almost all children with hearing loss have some amount of residual hearing that can be amplified and capitalized on to help them develop speech and language skills. Early amplification is a very important element in the Auditory-Verbal world. Without the ability to utilize residual hearing, the child cannot be successful. Therapists and families do often cover their mouths to discourage speech reading and encourage listening. However, this is not the main difference between Auditory-Verbal therapy and others. It is, perhaps, the most visible and obvious difference. Other important differences include high expectation levels, an emphasis on promoting natural language, an emphasis on the meaningful use of speech, the role of the parent, an emphasis on mainstreaming, and the goal of integrating listening and speech into the child's total personality.
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What specific therapy techniques are used in Auditory-Verbal therapy?
Auditory-Verbal therapy techniques are often subtle and, at first glance, it may be difficult to tell an Auditory-Verbal therapy session from another type of therapy. The emphasis on the auditory information, the use of acoustical highlighting and spacing, and pause time are all techniques you may notice in an Auditory-Verbal session.
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Isn't it frustrating to a child to use auditory only when they cannot hear well?
Yes, it is sometimes frustrating. However, it is that very frustration that is the motivation for the child. Parents must realize that sometimes providing the answer is actually providing disabling help. When the child is struggling to understand or wants to communicate something, that is the teachable moment. We teach parents how to seize that moment and make it work for the benefit of their child.
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Wouldn't it help a child to use some visual methods first, such as sign language?
When a child is born the brain is not fully developed. It still has decisions to make about how it will learn and process information from the senses. If the sense of hearing is impaired, the brain will begin to rely on vision for communication. It is easier and more available than the impaired sense of hearing. Unless the auditory sense is amplified and specifically stimulated, it will not develop. The brain will become used to using the visual sense and will not attend to the auditory information.
The critical period for language development is between 0 and 3 years. It is crucial that auditory stimulation take place during this time so that the brain learns to use it and spoken language skills develop. The use of sign language only impedes this development and makes it less likely that the brain will rely on an auditory signal for information about language.
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Are all children candidates for Auditory-Verbal therapy?
The most successful children are children whose parents are committed to making every experience a language opportunity and who emphasize the auditory at all times in the child's natural setting. However, even with the most dedicated parents some children do not encounter success with auditory information alone. This becomes apparent fairly soon and these children are referred to other methods. There is no generalization that can be made about success with the Auditory-Verbal method. However, most children do meet with success, and even those that move on to other methods benefit from the time spent on developing their auditory sense.
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Is family involvement crucial to success in Auditory-Verbal therapy?
Absolutely! The therapy time is considered an opportunity to teach the family how to carry over listening into the child's natural setting. Therapy at the Center is crucial because it is at that time that the child becomes trained to be in a total "listening mode" and learns to take part in listening activities. Parents learn what to expect at home and what reasonable goals for their child are during therapy. One of the most important things we do is to teach parents what they need to do at home in order to help their child meet with success. The therapy sessions are important and help the parents learn how to work with their child at home. It is in the home that the most frequent occasions to develop speech and language occur. It is during normal daily routines that children acquire their first comprehension of language use, and where the opportunities to introduce new vocabulary in a meaningful context naturally occur.
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Will my child's speech catch up to that of his friends?
Over time the "language gap" between the auditory-verbal child and his normally hearing peers will become less apparent.
Auditory-Verbal therapy begins with the premise that children learn language naturally and primarily through the hearing sense. The brain is wired to receive information about language through listening. Children with normal hearing acquire language without being specifically taught, and have often mastered their first words by the age of one year. That first year included a lot of listening and processing before the first word emerged.
The critical period for language development is between the ages of 0 and 3 years. It is crucial that children receive stimulation during this time in order to develop speech and language skills. Children with hearing losses experience a lack of stimulation prior to the time of discovering the hearing loss. It is only when amplification begins that work can begin to close the language gap between their ability and that of their normally hearing peers.
Children must pass through normal developmental levels of language acquisition. In Auditory-Verbal we consider a child's hearing age to be the time when amplification begins. They begin at ground zero, and must pass through all the normal developmental stages towards language acquisition.
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How often do we come for therapy?
Generally speaking, children benefit from two 60 minute sessions each week.
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Do Auditory-Verbal children learn to speech read?
Although therapy focuses on developing the auditory or speech skills, Auditory-Verbal children are excellent lip readers! Sanders Chart (Aural Rehabilitation and Speechreading) categorized phonemes according to their visibility. Only about 40%-50% of speech is actually visible. Many speech sounds are created inside the mouth and out of sight.
The average rate of speech is 150 words/minute. There are normally 12-15 articulatory movements (phonemes) each second. We can visually process an average of 8-9 phonemes each second. That's 2/3 of the signal.
We can speech read 2/3 of 50% by watching the lips. There are actually other factors involved in being able to use speechreading successfully. Speechreading involves a working knowledge of the use of language and a level of sophistication about the natural constraints and redundancies inherent in the English language. It involves a working knowledge of basic communication skills.
According to research, deaf children and adults who use speech are much better speechreaders. Auditory-Verbal children learn to use language, learn about communication, and use speech to communicate. Visual cues from speechreading are easily understood and used by Auditory-Verbal children because they take this information and combine it with the other skills they have learned. By using these skills simultaneously with speechreading, they are able to become excellent speechreaders.
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Will my child have perfect speech if she/he goes through an Auditory-Verbal program?
Children who go through our program have natural sounding melodic speech that is highly intelligible. However, it may not be perfect. Because the therapy focuses on natural language at the phrase level, and works on co-articulation skills rather than single words, the speech tends to flow more naturally and be very fluent. In Auditory-Verbal therapy there is an emphasis on the natural flow of language and language is "shaped" rather than "corrected." As Beebe herself put it, "Language is caught, not taught."
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