Gift of speech

With professional guidance, children with hearing loss problems can learn to speak and communicate. [Photo by Wang Jing / China Daily]

Auditory-verbal therapy has helped many children with impaired hearing in China. But one expert says the country still has a long way to go to narrow the ratio between the number of therapists and patients. Liu Zhihua reports.

In 2009, when Yang Shan's toddler suddenly pushed some chocolate off the table, uttering, "I don't want (it)", the young mother in Beijing was overwhelmed by ecstasy.

That was the first time the hearing-impaired 18-month-old boy, Xiao'ao, said anything other than "mama" and "papa".

"It was such a relief! I had been so worried that he could not speak," Yang says, crediting the progress to a special auditory-verbal therapy training program they attended.

Hearing is essential in speech and language development. The incidence rate of deafness among children younger than 6 is about 1.5 per 1,000. About 137,000 of children younger than 6 on the Chinese mainland suffer from hearing loss, with most of them at a profound to severe level, according to the China Disabled Persons' Federation.

The good news is, children with hearing loss in China now have a better and more natural way to develop their speech ability, through auditory-verbal therapy.

AVT, as its name indicates, is a method to teach hearing-impaired children to listen and speak, through amplification of their residual hearing with devices, such as hearing aids and cochlear implants. A key element: Making the parents part of the teaching and learning process, so the family can duplicate the therapy at home.

Originating in Australia, it is a mainstream method in some English-speaking countries, and now has increasing acceptance in China, says Chen Junlan, a special education specialist with the China Rehabilitation and Research Center for Deaf Children in Beijing.

"Having hearing loss doesn't mean the child would be mute, as long as he or she learns to speak," Chen says. "AVT is a great method to achieve that."

For average people, the acquisition of language is an imitation of what they hear from the environment. For children with hearing loss, they hear differently with artificial devices - all sounds in the environment are mixed and ambiguous, and thus they cannot pick up language as easily as ordinary people, Chen explains.

But with guidance to distinguish different sounds, and guidance to pronounce and practice, children will be able to speak and communicate.

Related: Newly available therapy gains popularity on Chinese mainland