SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY DEVELOPMENT IN SEVERE TO PROFOUND HEARING-IMPAIRED CHILDREN AND ESTABLISHMENT OF A DATA COLLECTION FOR EARLY INTERVENTION IN HEARING-IMPAIRED CHILDREN

The main goal of early detection of hearing impairment in children is early intervention.there is growing interest in early detection of hearing impairment in developing countries. the mainpurpose of this study was to investigate the spoken language development in severe to profound hearingimpaired children and compared their speech intelligibility with normal hearing children at the sameage. nine severe to profound hearing impaired children below 2 years old out of the primer 42 caseswere selected for this survey. they receive aural habilitation and also speech therapy after beginning thespeech production. speech intelligibility test of these children was recorded on audio-tape, when theyread five questions which can be answered with one word only, at the age of 4, 5 and 6 in comparisonwith 27 normal hearing children at the same age. at the age of 4 the mean speech intelligibility score ofthe studied group was 31.77% (sd 12.17) and the control was %96 (sd 2.23). at the age of 5, thisscore was %51.22 (sd 14.42), the control one 97.85% (sd 1.93). finally at age 6 it was 72% (sd18.97) for hearing–impaired group and 99.22% (sd 1.18) in control one. severe to profound hearingimpaired children acquired spoken language but not at the same level. in general, their speechdevelopment showed about 2 to 3 years delay. their speech intelligibility was acceptable for severegroup around the age 6 but almost semi–intelligible for profound group at the same age.