development of language and social skills in hearing-impaired children with and without rehabilitation

Background and purpose: language learning and socialization is a natural process unique to humans. profound hearing loss has far-reaching consequences for speech and personal-social development. this study aimed to compare the language and social skills development of normal-hearing children with hearing-impaired ones and studied the effect of hearing rehabilitation on selected developmental aspects of hearing-impaired children.materials and methods: of 149 children between 6 and 18 months recruited for this study, 55 girls and 65 boys were classified as normal-hearing children (nhc), 11 girls and 13 boys as non-rehabilitated hearing-impaired children (nrhic) group, and 3 girls and 2 boys as rehabilitated hearing-impaired children (rhic) group. the denver developmental screening test 2 (ddst-ii) evaluated their language and personal-social development. the obtained data were analyzed using the kruskal-wallis and mann-whitney u tests.results: the development of language between the nhc group and the rhic (p=0.016) and nrhic (p=0.001) groups was statistically significant (p≤0.05). the development of personal-social skills between the nhc group and rhic (p=0.004) and nrhic (p=0.001) groups were statistically significant. however, the difference in these two developmental aspects, language (p=0.770) and personal social (p=0.0421), between the two hearing-impaired groups was not significant.conclusion: delays in language and social skills development are evident in hearing-impaired children at an early age, so the age of onset of rehabilitation should be reduced as early as possible. the denver-ii screening test is recommended to evaluate the language and skills development in the health centers and centers specialized for hearing-impaired children aged 6 to 18 months.