April 17, 2008

This week was kind of a slow week since clinic is wrapping up for the semester. I saw a couple hearing aid checks mostly.

I did see one man who has been coming to the hearing clinic for years. He is 23. His mother stated that he wasn't hearing as well as she thought, so she made an appointment for him to come in for his annual hearing evaluation. His hearing had not changed and he said he was happy with his current hearing aid settings. We replaced the tubing bilaterally.

I found an article that dealt with the representational abilities and hearing status in child/mother dyads. In this study, the researchers looked at expressive and receptive language in symbolic play activities. The study was conducted on normal hearing and deaf children who had normal hearing and deaf mothers. As reported by the mothers, hearing children of both hearing and deaf mothers produced more words than deaf children with hearing or deaf mothers. Hearing children were also able to comprehend more words than the deaf children born to either parent. The findings from this study showed that there are many implications of hearing status in communication exchanges between mother and child.

Reference:
Bornstein, M.H., Selmi, A.M., Haynes, O.M., Painter, K.M., and Marx, E.S. (1999). Representational abilities and hearing status in children/mother dyads. Child Development. 70(4). 833-852.

If you would like to read this article, please copy and paste the following link into your browser.
http://wf2la1.webfeat.org/EgusJ1117/url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1132245.pdf