Dual Spoken Language Learning for Children with Hearing Loss

What is it about?

With the right support, children with cochlear implants and hearing aids CAN learn more than one spoken language! This article is a comparison between two groups of children with hearing loss. One group received intervention in both spoken Spanish and English because their families only spoke Spanish, and their children were going to an English speaking school. The other group came from English-only speaking homes and received intervention in English only. There were no differences in the English skills between the groups. The bilingual group learned both languages at a steady rate with no differences in proficiency between the two languages. In fact they were highly correlative of each other. If you can learn one language, you can learn another - even if you have significant hearing loss.

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Why is it important?

This article is very important because it helps to answer some difficult questions and address negative professional biases that have historically not been informed by evidence. Our findings are very encouraging for SLPs and educators who work with bilingual and monolingual children with HL because there is no evidence that either language should be discouraged. Our data provide evidence that children and their families should not abandon using their home language; rather, they can and should encourage speech and language development in both languages if they choose to do so. Working with the children and their families, SLPs and educators are encouraged to foster dual-language development because engaging with the clients and their caregivers is likely to provide a nurturing environment as well as accelerate language development in bilingual children with HL.