Parents' Guide to Speech Therapy

Hearing from a cochlear implant

Attaining most benefits from your cochlear implant

Design different fun activities that make both hearing and listening interesting for the recipient

Always recommended to encourage the recipient to make different noises

Talking about things and activities that people around the recipient are doing as they do them

Check with your professional on your child’s progress in terms of vocabulary, speech & understanding.

Communication used by the recipient should involve hearing & speaking

Undergo auditory verbal training

Listening to audiobooks and reading books out loud

Speech Therapy

Speech-language pathologists also known as SLPs are communication specialists¹.

SLPs should help with assessing and enhancing communication skills of a cochlear implant recipient. SLPs can work with all age groups from babies to adults.

This process is known as aural habilitation (or rehabilitation if retraining). It is the process of helping the patient gain listening and communication skills. Key techniques include:

Speech reading
Voice therapy
Music training

The objective remains the same that is to re-establish full speech and language abilities to go along with the restored ability to hear.

Comparatively, children as a group to adults are more adaptable and able to learn. Thus, they can potentially benefit more from a cochlear implant. Hearing loss can slow down a child’s skill to learn to speak and impacts their overall language progress. A cochlear implant can provide that vocal quality and lucidity f speech from children. It is important to practice speech at home and learn as a child starts hearing.

Having said that, Neubio supports all its patients in all ways to maximize the benefits provided by our cochlear implant

References

Online Speech-Language Pathology Graduate Degree Programs. (2018, January 12). Speech Language Pathology and Cochlear Implants | Job Description and Certification. Online Speech-Language Pathology Graduate Degree Programs | Your Guide to Communicative Science and Disorders Education.