engleski

Applying a Verbotonal Method to Rehabilitation of the Hearing Impaired Children

The rehabilitation of listening in the principles of verbotonal method (VT) implies expansion of optimal hearing field of impaired ear. That means achieved hearing transfer i.e., transpose of listening from impaired frequency range to undemaged part. For example, ear which is strong impaired in the high frequency range obtain a capability for listening of words and sentences which belong to high frequency range. In the first case there is patient whose hearing impaired progressively because of many ear abscess (the main disease is Mucopolisaharidose tip II), this patient listens with hearing aids. While in the second case patient with the same history of the hearing impairment (progressively) at the age of nine received cochlear implant because of the strong hearing impairment. A scale was used as a test for the purpose of assessing listening of speech (EHS), (Jurjević, 2002), which is the result of many years of work with hearing impaired children, using the VT method and its basic principles about listening. The EHS scale is the easy and simple way of examining the listening of speech in the conditions of everyday spontaneous communication, in order to gain insight into the real possibility of listening of speech in all its components. The EHS scale examines listening of speech through ten levels from basic auditory recognition to precise listening and discernment of pairs of similar words. When choosing words, the frequency of speech material in the speech of children of certain chronological age was taken into account, as well as representation of congruent pitch words according to their appearance in the Croatian language. Tasks could be repeated up to three times, making sure that the repetition of a task does not undermine values of spoken language. The system of errors was analyzed as well as the number of repetitions in which the correct answer was reached. The results of this test give us the valuable data in further procedures of speech and hearing rehabilitation.

hearing impairment ; verbotonal method ; speech and hearing rehabilitation

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