| Description |
Today’s digital hearing aids with extended bandwidths can provide excellent access to speech for children with hearing loss. In addition, cochlear implants provide significant benefit to appropriate candidates who do not have access to speech through hearing aids. The immediate benefit of digital hearing aids and/or cochlear implants can be so significant that any improvement is assumed to be sufficient, but is it optimal? Why does the performance and progress of children with hearing aids and/or cochlear implants vary greatly? By utilizing specific evaluations of audition and speech perception, parents, Listening and Spoken Language Specialists (LSLS™), teachers, speech-language pathologists and audiologists can identify "red flags" indicating less than optimal performance. Techniques parents and professionals use to evaluate performance will be discussed. Programming changes based on these performance measures will also be detailed. Case studies will be presented to illustrate common issues, the techniques used to identify them and the performance changes observed with programming changes.
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