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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Auditory Training in Deaf Children

subject

description

Deaf children are, earlier than in the past, identified and can benefit of new and highperformance devices (as cochlear implants or digital hearing aids). However, a great variability in their spoken language skills is observed (12) and first attributable to the well-known effect of the age of auditory rehabilitation (15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22). The second assessment concerns the way speech disorders are treated: new technologies are not linked to any change in the way speech therapy is delivered, particularly in the field of auditory training. Auditory training constitutes an important part of the speech therapy addressed to the deaf children and must start as soon as possible. The goal always consists in maximizing the effects of hearing aids or cochlear implants, allowing the children to process the sounds (especially speech sounds) more accurately (9). In other words, the auditory training must help deaf children to extract perceptive characteristics from the auditory input. This constitutes a condition of the construction of an auditory lexicon and the learning of language. The goal of this chapter consists in presenting a therapeutic approach in deaf children’s auditory training using an implicit learning paradigm. At first, we will describe and analyze the principles used in the traditional approach of auditory education in deaf children. In the last section, we will present how implicit learning has been used in this special field, the effects on both trained and untrained auditory perceptive tasks.