Browsing by Author "Kankaanpää, Miia"

Aim. Approximately 50-60 children are born with severe to profound hearing impairment in Finland every year. Speech therapy for hearing impaired (HI) children consists of many different methods depending on the child's and his/hers family's individual needs. The main emphasis in HI children's speech therapy in Finland is in the auditory-verbal method. There is only a little information to be found in the literature about the contents of speech therapy for HI children (who use cochlear implants (CI) or hearing aids (HA)). The aim of this study was to find out how much Finnish speech and language therapists (SLTs) have experience about the rehabilitation of HI children. In addition the goal was to find out what components are used in HI children's speech therapy and what role does the children's parents have in their child's linguistic rehabilitation. Method. This study was carried out as a survey. An electronic questionnaire was send via the Finnish Association of Speech Therapists to 1154 SLTs in Finland. A total of 85 responses were received so the response rate was 7.4 %. The data was analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 22 -program. Frequencies, percentages and descriptive statistical analysis were computed (for example average and standard deviation). The data was demonstrated graphically. Rank correlation of ordinal variables was measured using Spearman's rho (ρ), Kendall's tau-c (τ) and Goodman and Kruskal's gamma (γ) rank correlations. Results and conclusions. The results show that Finnish SLTs have only little experience about the rehabilitations of HI children. The most common components in HI children's speech therapy were supporting and guiding children's early vocalizations, auditory training and training of vocabulary. The contents of CI- and HA- children's speech therapy seems to be very similar. The most common approach used in speech and language therapy was auditory-verbal method but total communication and pictures were commonly used as well. The results show that parent's role in HI children's rehabilitations varied quite a lot. It was quite common that parents were not present during their child's speech therapy and the SLTs reported that they would ask separately if they wanted the parents to be present in some speech therapy session. However the results show that most of the SLTs and parents were equal partners in HI children's linguistic rehabilitation. More research is needed to discover factors that influence the contents of HI children's speech therapy and the parent's role in their child's linguistic rehabilitation.