What is Auditory-Verbal Therapy?

Auditory – Verbal therapy (AVT) is an approach to teaching children who are deaf or hearing impaired to understand and develop spoken language through listening.   This is possible because modern hearing aids and Cochlear Implants are powerful enough to be able to give almost all children enough access to sound to develop spoken language.

Doreen Pollack was one of the foremost pioneers of AVT in the 1950s.  She said, “I learned that one could not simply hang a hearing aid on children and expect them to develop hearing perceptions normally.  Instead the children continued to act as if they were deaf.  Sound was meaningless.  When the children were encouraged to use lip-reading or signing they continued to be visual learners and ignored sound.  I came to realize that one did not have to teach deaf children to look but instead one had to teach them to listen.  A hearing aid gave more hearing, but listening had to be learned.  I had to make sound an important and meaningful part of everything the children were experiencing”

The goal of AVT is to allow children who are deaf or hearing impaired to integrate and participate into the hearing world.  Therapists use individualized therapy sessions with a child to teach the parents or carers how to find opportunities throughout the day to develop auditory learning in their children.

1. Promote early diagnosis of hearing loss in newborns, infants, toddlers and children, followed by immediate audiological management and Auditory-Verbal Therapy.
2. Recommend immediate assessment and use of appropriate, state-of-the-art hearing technology to obtain maximum benefits of auditory stimulation.
3. Guide and coach parents to help their child use hearing as the primary sensory modality in developing spoken language without the use of sign language or emphasis on lipreading.
4. Guide and coach parents† to become the primary facilitators of their child's listening and spoken language development through active, consistent participation in individualised Auditory-Verbal therapy.
5. Guide and coach parents to create environments that support listening for the acquisition of spoken language throughout the child's daily activities.
6. Guide and coach parents to help their child integrate listening and spoken language into all aspects of the child's life.
7. Guide and coach parents to use natural developmental patterns of audition, speech, language, cognition and communication.
8. Guide and coach parents to help their child self-monitor spoken language through listening.
9. Administer ongoing formal and informal diagnostic assessments to develop individualised Auditory-Verbal treatment plans, to monitor progress and to evaluate the effectiveness of the plans for the child and their family.
10. Promote educations in regular classrooms with typical hearing peers and with appropriate support services from early childhood onward

At Matilda Rose Early Intervention Centre we work with children who have disabilities in addition to hearing impairment.  Because the communication needs of our children are more complex than for children who only have hearing impairment, we work with the principles of AVT, but modify them when appropriate to incorporate Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) strategies.