Communication interventions for pre-school deaf children (CIPDeC)

Together with appropriate amplification, active family involvement in intervention programmes is a key predictor of deaf children’s language outcomes. Intervention with families of pre-school deaf children includes orientation to and maintenance of amplification devices, parent counselling and family administrative support as well as interventions that directly address speech and language development through interaction between parent/carer and child. Our study focuses on the latter.

In 2011 we conducted a pilot survey which indicated that the main approaches used by professionals engaging in this kind of intervention in the UK, were Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT) (www.listeningandspokenlanguage.org), Hanen (www.hanen.org ), “Parent-Child Interaction Therapy” (Kelman & Schneider, 1994) and guidance from the Monitoring Protocol (http://tinyurl.com/q52n73e).

In our next survey in 2012, we asked all professionals involved in communication intervention with families of pre-school deaf children in the UK about how they may be combining approaches and how they were translating them into intervention practices in terms of strategies parents were encouraged to use and the methods by which they were encouraged to adopt the strategies (click here for a PDF of our questionnaire). Results were reported at a 2012 meeting of the Centre for Speech and Language Therapy Intervention Research see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cslir/events/rachel_rees_cipdec_2012.

Key publication:

Rees, R., Mahon, N., Herman, R., Newton, C. & Craig, G. (in press). Communication interventions for families of pre-school deaf children in the UK. Deafness & Education International