Instruments for evaluating the parental emotional status and ecological support systems among parents who considered cochlear implantation for their children with hearing loss: A scoping review.

Objectives: Parents of children diagnosed with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss may experience a range of emotions owing to a lack of knowledge and experience in dealing with such children. However, most audiology clinics only attend to children with deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) and not their parents. Thus, parents' emotional and support needs are frequently excluded from the intervention sessions, making their own needs invisible.

Cross-modal digit span and vocabulary proficiency in deaf or hard-of-hearing children.

This study aims to examine the relationship between vocabulary proficiency and short-term memory capacity in deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) children. We test the hypothesis that the relationship between vocabulary skills and digit span performance could be strengthened when the digit span task encompasses cross-modal integration processes. A group of DHH children performed two types of auditory digit span tasks.

Impact of Hearing Aids on Language Outcomes in Preschool Children With Mild Bilateral Hearing Loss.

This study aimed to investigate the role of hearing aid (HA) usage in language outcomes among preschool children aged 3-5 years with mild bilateral hearing loss (MBHL). The data were retrieved from a total of 52 children with MBHL and 30 children with normal hearing (NH). The association between demographical, audiological factors and language outcomes was examined.

Effect of sample length on MLU in Mandarin-speaking hard-of-hearing children.

This study investigated the impact of language sample length on mean length of utterance (MLU) and aimed to determine the minimum number of utterances required for a reliable MLU. Conversations were collected from Mandarin-speaking, hard-of-hearing and typical-hearing children aged 16-81 months. The MLUs were calculated using sample sizes ranging from 25 to 200 utterances.

Hearing aid wear time and its impact on vocabulary in preschoolers with moderately severe to profound hearing loss.

Objective: This study aimed to explore how the consistency of hearing aid (HA) use impacts vocabulary performance in children with moderately severe to profound hearing loss and determine the amount of HA use time associated with better vocabulary outcomes.

Design: Personal wear time percentage (WTP) was an indicator of HA use consistency, and the information on HA wear time was collected from both parent reports and datalogs. Pearson's correlations were performed to investigate the associations between hearing loss severity, WTP and vocabulary performance.

Does the duration matter? Effect of cochlear implantation on language development in Mandarin-speaking children with hearing loss.

Objective: Several studies have shown that cochlear implantation (CI) can influence language development in children with severe-to-profound hearing loss. However, whether the age of implantation and duration of CI use influence language development remains unclear, particularly in Mandarin-speaking children with hearing loss. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of CI-related variables on language development in these children.

Perspectives and performance changes of parents in aural-oral rehabilitation: From in-person to telepractice.

Introduction: The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has reinforced the necessity and importance of telepractice. Although studies suggest frameworks to facilitate telepractice implementation, how parents learn related therapeutic skills via telepractice remains unexplored. The purpose of this study was to explore the perspectives and performance changes of parents with children enrolled in aural-oral rehabilitation who transition from in-person sessions to telepractice.

Reading Comprehension of Chinese-Speaking Children With Hearing Loss: The Roles of Metalinguistic Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge.

Purpose: This study aims to explore the contributions of phonological awareness (PA) and morphological awareness (MA) to the reading comprehension skills of Chinese-speaking children with hearing loss (HL) and examine the possible mediation effect of vocabulary knowledge on the relationships of PA and MA with their reading comprehension.

Method: The participants were 28 Chinese-speaking children with HL, who were followed from Grade 1 through Grade 2. They were administered a series of tests that measured their PA and MA at the beginning of Grade 1, vocabulary knowledge at the end of Grade 1, and reading comprehension at the end of Grade 2.

Audiogram of Chinese Phonemes: Construction and Evaluation.

Introduction: In aural rehabilitation, speech bananas are often used as a counseling tool to visually indicate one's auditory access to speech sounds. We constructed a Chinese-based speech banana to provide Chinese-speaking users with a more appropriate distribution of Chinese speech sounds on an audiogram.

Method: The location of each phoneme was defined by its frequency and intensity.

Children With Unilateral Hearing Loss After Newborn Hearing Screening in Taiwan.

Purpose: We explored the intervention characteristics and language outcomes of children with unilateral hearing loss (UHL) in Taiwan after the implementation of universal newborn hearing screening (UNHS) to highlight changes in attitudes and actions toward hearing-related treatments.

Method: Data of 132 children with UHL in birth cohorts from 2012 to 2019 were included. This retrospective study examined differences in age at identification, hearing aid (HA) fitting, and seeking supportive services.

Behavioral and Neural Assessments of Auditory Skill Development After Hearing Instrument Fitting in Children: Case Reports and Clinical Implications.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to comprehensively monitor the auditory skill development of children with hearing loss after hearing instrument fitting, and a battery of four assessments was proposed.

Method: This battery was designed to fill the gap in speech discrimination in clinically available evaluations. The battery includes both behavioral and neural assessments.

Development of the Mandarin Phoneme Detection Score Sheet as a Screening Tool.

Background And Objectives: Hearing thresholds across frequencies must be obtained for hearing aid fitting. Narrow-band noise (NBN) and speech sounds are often used as stimuli in pediatric audiologic assessments to elicit children's attention due to their wider frequency ranges as compared to pure tones. However, obtaining complete responses across frequency ranges is challenging in pediatric practice.

Developing new scales for assessing parents' aural and oral rehabilitation skills to interact with children with hearing loss.

Objective: Scales for evaluating the teaching and behavioural skills of parents enrolled in aural and oral rehabilitation programs for children with hearing loss are lacking. This study developed and validated scales for assessing parental teaching and behavioural skills of those parents for use in guiding their child to develop language and communication skills.

Design: Scales were constructed and evaluated using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.

Newborn hearing screening and early auditory-based treatment in Taiwan: action trends of families with children who are hearing impaired.

Objective: To explore the trends in actions and factors influencing families of children with hearing loss, regarding early treatment following the implementation of a newborn hearing screening (NHS) in Taiwan.

Design: A retrospective study was conducted by extracting data from the treatment histories of families with children who had hearing loss and who were contacted and assessed by the non-profit organisation (NPO). Children born between 2012 and 2018 were included.

Auditory memory span in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with congenital hearing loss: Impact of task structure.

The current research was conducted to test the prediction that children who have hearing loss and are developing spoken language can perform at the same level as hearing children in an auditory memory span task if actual production of speech is excluded from task requirement. A listen-and-point digit span task and two sub-tests of Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV (Verbal Digit Span and Matrix Reasoning) were administered to thirty hearing children and thirty-three children with hearing loss. A language assessment instrument for Mandarin-speaking preschool children was also administered to the participants with hearing loss.

Children's Demonstrative Comprehension and the Role of Non-linguistic Cognitive Abilities: A Cross-Linguistic Study.

Previous studies have shown that young children often fail to comprehend demonstratives correctly when they are uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children's own, and instead tend to interpret them with respect to their own perspective (e.g., Webb and Abrahamson in J Child Lang 3(3):349-367, 1976); Clark and Sengul in J Child Lang 5(3):457-475, 1978).

Validation of the Chinese Sound Test: Auditory Performance of Hearing Aid Users.

Purpose: The Chinese Sound Test (Hung, Lin, Tsai, & Lee, 2016) has been recently developed as a modified version of the Ling Six-Sound Test (Ling, 2012). By incorporating Chinese speech sounds, this test should be able to estimate whether the listener can hear across the Chinese speech spectrum. To establish the clinical validity of the test, this study examined the relationship between the aided audiometric thresholds and the distance thresholds.

Early Reading Development in Chinese-speaking Children with Hearing Loss.

This study aims to explore early reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking children with hearing loss (HL) by examining character recognition and linguistic comprehension. Twenty-five children with HL received three measures relevant to character reading: phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and character recognition; two linguistic-comprehension measures: receptive vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension; and one reading comprehension measure. Three demographic variables pertinent to children with HL were also taken into account.

Vowel production of Mandarin-speaking hearing aid users with different types of hearing loss.

In contrast with previous research focusing on cochlear implants, this study examined the speech performance of hearing aid users with conductive (n = 11), mixed (n = 10), and sensorineural hearing loss (n = 7) and compared it with the speech of hearing control. Speech intelligibility was evaluated by computing the vowel space area defined by the Mandarin Chinese corner vowels /a, u, i/. The acoustic differences between the vowels were assessed using the Euclidean distance.

Working Memory Capacity as a Factor Influencing the Relationship between Language Outcome and Rehabilitation in Mandarin-Speaking Preschoolers with Congenital Hearing Impairment.

Memory processes could account for a significant part of the variance in language performances of hearing-impaired children. However, the circumstance in which the performance of hearing-impaired children can be nearly the same as the performance of hearing children remains relatively little studied. Thus, a group of pre-school children with congenital, bilateral hearing loss and a group of pre-school children with normal hearing were invited to participate in this study.

Contribution of bimodal hearing to lexical tone normalization in Mandarin-speaking cochlear implant users.

Native Mandarin normal-hearing (NH) listeners can easily perceive lexical tones even under conditions of great voice pitch variations across speakers by using the pitch contrast between context and target stimuli. It is however unclear whether cochlear implant (CI) users with limited access to pitch cues can make similar use of context pitch cues for tone normalization. In this study, native Mandarin NH listeners and pre-lingually deafened unilaterally implanted CI users were asked to recognize a series of Mandarin tones varying from Tone 1 (high-flat) to Tone 2 (mid-rising) with or without a preceding sentence context.