| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立台北護理學院 === 聽語障礙科學研究所 === 92 === Using early intervention as an effective way for infant with hearing impairment has been developed in clinical practices (Moeller, 2000; Robinshaw, 1995, 1996; Yoshinaga-Itano, 1999; Yoshinaga-Itano, Sedey, Coulter & Mehl, 1998). This research focused on the effect of early intervention on language comprehension and production for preschool children with hearing impairment in Taiwan. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of intervention age of aural habilitation in language comprehension and production for preschool children with hearing impairment and high level family involvement.
The age of subjects ranged from 36 to 64 months old. These subjects were divided into three groups, where the control group consists of six normal children and the group with hearing impairment consists of two subgroups (early and late intervention groups). The three children with hearing impairment and their intervention age ranged from two to four months are classified as early intervention group. The thirteen children with hearing impairment and their intervention age ranged from seven and 35 months are classified as late intervention group. The test materials include Child Development Inventory (CDI), Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT), Preschool Language Comprehension Test (PLC) and Language Disorder Assessment (LDA) for Preschool Children, and Family Participation Rating Scale (FPRS) proposed by Moeller (2000).
Results indicated that the early intervention, late intervention, and control groups did not significantly affect the vocabulary skill. For these two groups with hearing impairment, the mean is above PPVT average standard score of 100. This finding is consistent with Moeller (2000), who reported the benefits of early enrollment and high level family involvement ratings are significant. The result of Kruskal-Wallis test indicated that the control group did not demonstrate a better capability in the aspect of language comprehension and production compared to early and late intervention groups with high level family involvement. Of the two groups, all the test scores indicated that the early intervention group has a higher percentage of high scores than the late intervention group, especially for the score of language comprehension. The results also indicated that family involvement and development ability of children contribute to language ability of children more than the degree of hearing loss. It is speculated that these findings may be associated with children with hearing impairment enrolled in this study have been aided with listening devices in the tests.
Further study is warranted to evaluate other aspects of speech-language abilities in children with hearing impairment, such as articulation/intelligibility, intonation, voice quality, fluency, and suprasegmental.
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