The use of facilitative language techniques by mothers with hearing-impaired children using cochlear implants.

Objectives: Role of parents in early childhood language development is quite important. The children of young age learn the language from their daily life experiences and especially during their interactions with their parents. However, families with hearing-impaired children have difficulty communicating with their children. The language development characteristics of hearing-impaired children using hearing aids or cochlear implants are closely related to the characteristics of the language input provided to them by their families. The purpose of this study is to assess the use of facilitative language techniques by families of hearing-impaired children using cochlear implants Material and Method: Study was carried out with eight children who are hearing-impaired, aged one to three years, have severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss, use a cochlear implant (uni/bilateral) and were trained with the Auditory-Verbal Therapy (AVT) and the mothers of these children. In order to collect the data, the interactions of the mother with the child were recorded for 15 minutes. The techniques used by the mothers are marked according to their frequency in the entry form developed by the researcher. Results and Conclusions: A result of the study, a significant increase in both the number and variety of the use of facilitative language techniques were determined for all of the surveyed mothers in comparison to the preliminary evaluation. The use of facilitative language techniques by mothers has been found out to be feasible and it is thought to be beneficial to include these techniques in early childhood intervention programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]