Presenter: Dr. Christine Yoshinaga-Itano

Cochlear Implantation Outcomes:  American Sign Language and Auditory Therapies

This session will present the longitudinal language development of over 25 children in the state of Colorado born between 1998 and 2003 and followed for the first 7 years of life.  Age of implantation ranged from 12 months to 48 months.  The vast proportion of these children were identified as deaf or hard of hearing prior to six months of age, with the exception of some children who were born with normal hearing but acquired hearing loss in the first few years of life.  Children in Colorado are confirmed as deaf or hard of hearing today at a mean age of 29 days.  Parents often have first contact with a professional who is deaf or hard of hearing at the first audiological evaluation.  They will be referred to early intervention and about 35 to 40% are contacted by a Colorado Hearing Coordinator who is hard of hearing.  They are offered sign language instruction by a native and/or fluent sign language instructor who is deaf or hard of hearing.  There are approximately 40-50 trained  sign language instructors.  If families chose this option, they receive 1.5 hours per week of sign language instruction in the home.  The families are offered 1.5 hours of weekly home intervention services from a certified educator of the deaf, speech/language pathologist or audiologist.   Of the early intervention providers along the Colorado Front Range  about 20% of the providers are deaf or hard of hearing.  The average age of implantation for congenitally deaf infants is about 12 months of age.  If the parents choose this option, they also typically add a child-centered clinic-based weekly hour auditory therapy after the implantation.  It is not uncommon for a family to invite their sign language instructor to the cochlear implant candidacy meeting.  The session will include research information about the central auditory pathways of these early implanted children, monitoring of auditory skill development, assessment of the daily spoken language environment, early sign language development and early spoken language development.

1. Participants will be able to identify the sign and spoken language trajectories of children who are deaf, whose families are learning sign language and have successful spoken language outcomes.
2. Participants will be able to identify critical characteristics for successful cochlear implant outcomes of children who sign, including age of implantation and characteristics of auditory therapies,
3. Participants will learn some new assessment procedures for auditory development and spoken language environment analysis including Visual Reinforcement Infant Speech Discrimination, Cortical Auditory Evoked Potentials and LENA (Language Environment Analysis) procedures.
4. Participants will be able to discuss characteristics of EHDI follow-through systems, including Deaf/Hard of Hearing Infusion of professionals, sign language instruction from native/fluent signers, Deaf Mentors/Role Models, increases in Deaf/Hard of Hearing early intervention providers, audiologists, speech/language pathologists and mental health professionals.

Bio:

Dr. Christine Yoshinaga-Itano is a Professor of Audiology in the Department of Speech,Language and Hearing Sciences, Institute of Cognitive Science, Center for Neurosciences, University of Colorado at Boulder; Department of Otolaryngology and Audiology, University of Colorado at Denver; and the Marion Downs Hearing Center. She received her Bachelors degree from the University of Southern California in Psychology, her Masters degree in Education of the Hearing Impaired and Ph.D. in Audiology and Hearing Impairment from Northwestern University. Dr. Yoshinaga-Itano is both a teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing and an audiologist. She has conducted research in the areas of language, speech, and social-emotional development of deaf and hard-of-hearing infants and children for over thirty years. Her research has been used as justification for establishing universal newborn hearing screening throughout the United States and also world-wide.  Over the last 20 to 30 years, she has focused on the impact of early-identification and early intervention on the developmental outcomes of children with significant hearing loss. In addition, she has served as a consultant for many countries currently developing their early hearing detection and intervention programs, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, Korea, Belgium, Poland, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Philippines, and South Africa.