The first year

of life is a critical time for auditory experiences and the lack of auditory

experiences can have profound detrimental effects. If an infant has hearing

loss at birth then is the time to intervene as it will allow the child

to develop close to normal academically, personally and socially.

Although it

is not visible to observers, infants with hearing are learning to process

speech and understand language and are quite linguistically sophisticated

by 1 year of age. At the same time, the neurons in the auditory brainstem

are maturing, and billions of major neural connections are being formed.

Hearing loss

in newborn infants can go undetected until as late as 2 years of age without

specialized testing. When hearing loss is detected in the new born period,

infants can benefit from amplification (hearing aids) and intervention

to facilitate speech and language development. All evidence regarding

neural development supports such early intervention for maximum development

of communication ability and hearing in infants.

Children with

early hearing loss who are not identified and intervention does not occurred

will suffer many undesirable effects such as lagging behind as many as

several years academically, poor language development, poor speech production,

and undeveloped social and personal skills. National Infant Hearing Screening

parameters insist on identifying an infant with hearing loss before 3

months of age and the intervention before 6 months of age.

Andrew Waits

clinical audiologist

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