Survey on language rehabilitation methods in deaf Italian children with cochlear implants

Purpose: To survey the rehabilitation methods of deaf Italian children implanted in two tertiary care referral centers; to investigate on associations between rehabilitation method and patients’ clinical features. Method: Inclusion criteria were age ≤16 years, diagnosis of pre-perilingual bilateral deafness of severe-profound degree, use of cochlear implants (CIs) for at least 8 h a day, ongoing speech therapy. Children's Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs) were emailed a questionnaire created for the study purpose and consisting of 39 yes/no questions exploring five fundamental areas of speech and language rehabilitation. For each questionnaire, a separate score was obtained for the following Italian methods: Auditory Verbal Therapy (AVT), Cognitive Oralism (CO), Bimodal (B) and Dreazancic (D). AVT and CO were considered as oral methods, whereas B and D were categorized as mixed methods. Results: 100 SLTs responded to the questionnaire. The rehabilitation method was composite in the majority (69 %) of cases. The most prevalent method was CO (32.5 %), followed by D (28.4 %), B (18.7 %), and AVT (15.4 %); in 6 cases (4.9 %) AVT and CO scored equally high. No association was found between patients’ demographic and clinical features and rehabilitation method. Conclusions: AVT resulted as the least prevalent method, whereas mixed methods covered almost 50 % of cases in our population. The majority of children in our sample were rehabilitated with combined approaches that did not seem to be related to any specific patients' characteristics, but possibly to therapists’ education and background.