Menu

@ 2023 FSDB
The website is owned by Foundation for
Speaking Deaf Babies.

Timing of early intervention and preschool training influences spoken language development

* Created with BioRender.com

* Created with BioRender.com

 

The first three years of life is very critical for a person to develop speech and language skills. The brain is still developing and figuring out how to make sense of the sounds heard by the baby. During this critical phase, the brain is able to easily learn language. If the baby is repeatedly exposed to sounds and the language spoken by the people around, the baby starts learning how to speak in the same language.

This is the reason why early identification of hearing loss, followed by immediate intervention, is extremely important in order to enable a baby with hearing loss to learn how to hear and speak. It has been estimated that in the first 3 months of life of an infant with normal hearing, they are exposed to more than 3 million words. This number of words and sounds only increases with time.

In the case of an infant with hearing loss, they miss to hear all these sounds. During early intervention that includes the LSL training, the baby is trained to hear all the sounds they missed since birth till the time they are fitted with a sensory device (hearing aids or cochlear implants). The earlier the diagnosis and intervention is done, less is the amount of language lost, and therefore during the process of LSL training, it is easier to artificially provide all the missed language to the baby.

Delaying the diagnosis and intervention process leads to more language being missed by the child. As a result, the amount of missed language that has to be artificially provided to the child during LSL training is even higher, making it difficult for the child to learn spoken language