Speech and Language

The most handicapping aspect of hearing impairment is related to the obstacles created in the child's ability to communicate using the language of the community at large. Children whose hearing losses occur before they have the opportunity to develop expressive skills in the language spoken by their families often have difficulty mastering oral language skills. Thus, an 8-year-old child with a profound hearing loss who became handicapped after her second or third birthday may have better speech, language, reading, and writing skills than a classmate with a milder hearing loss that occurred shortly after birth.

The English and speech skills of children with hearing impairment often lag far behind those of their able-bodied peers. Whereas most children are able to use their hearing to learn both the language and speech patterns of their community, children with hearing handicaps must often be taught these skills directly through much painstaking repetition and corrective instruction. These students' speech problems often include the omission or substitution of some sounds, problems with speech intonation and pitch, and difficulties with the normal rate and rhythm of spoken English. Speech may sound nasal, guttural, or breathy. In general, individuals with mild to moderate hearing losses may have more intelligible speech than do those with severe to profound losses.

In addition to speech and oral articulation impairments, hearing loss can make it difficult for children to learn the vocabulary, structure, and rules of the oral language in their community. Children with hearing impairment usually have limited vocabularies as compared to nonhandicapped students. These students may omit grammatical components of English such as plurals, prepositions, articles (a, the), tenses, and a variety of "little" words or word endings. These children tend to use short and simple sentences and rely often on subject-verb-object word order. Students with hearing impairment may lack an understanding of alternative meanings for words and figurative language.