Auditory-verbal therapy is a method for speech therapy. AVT teaches hearing impaired children to listen and speak using their residual hearing in addition to the constant use of amplification devices like hearing aids and cochlear implants.
The Auditory Verbal approach stimulates child's auditory brain development and enables deaf children with hearing aids and cochlear implants to make sense of the sound relayed by their devices. As a result, hearing impaired children are better able to develop listening and spoken language skills. Thus, they can cope as like the normal hearing children and go to normal schools.
Parents are well trained with skills to maximise their hearing impaired child's speech and language development as they are the child's primary and most effective teachers. Auditory Verbal therapy enables parents to help their hearing impaired child to make the best possible use of hearing technology. Parents work in collaboration with their audiology and speech pathology team.
AVT enables Child maximise access to sound, so that listening and spoken language skills can be developed to the fullest extent possible. Hence, the child develops a listening attitude so that paying attention to the sound around him becomes automatic. All learning trained in AVT are play based sessions and parents carries all sessions into everyday life.
What are the communication options for hearing impaired children?
There are different options for hearing impaired child including sign language, cued speech, oral speech & language therapy and Auditory Verbal therapy. Auditory Verbal therapy (AVT) is the approach that is most focused on the child auditory brain development and makes them go to normal school along with normal hearing children.
What is different in AVT from regular Speech Therapy?
AVT approach differs from other speech and language therapy approaches in a number of ways.
AVT concentrates on developing the hearing part of the brain (auditory cortex) rather than relying on visual cues. It develops the brain as a listening brain rather than predominantly a visual brain. The auditory verbal approach is distinctive in the way it makes the child hearing as the main sense for developing spoken language.
AVT focuses on training the parents the child in the use of auditory verbal strategies in everyday activities. So that, every opportunity is used to develop their child's listening brain and spoken language skills.
AVT works in most of period of neural plasticity in the first three and a half years of life.