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HEARING IMPAIRMENTS
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Hearing
impairment is a broad term which refers to
hearing losses of varying degrees from
"hard-of-hearing" to "total
deafness." The
major challenge facing students with hearing
impairments is communication.
- Hearing-impaired students vary
widely in their communication skills.
Among the conditions that affect the
development of communication skills of persons
with hearing impairments are personality,
intelligence, nature and degree of deafness,
degree and type of residual hearing, degree of
benefit derived from amplification/ by hearing
aid, family environment, and age of onset. Age
of onset plays a crucial role in the development
of language.
- Persons with prelingual hearing
loss (present at birth or occurring
before the acquisition of language and the
development of speech patterns) are more
functionally disabled than those who lose some
degree of hearing after the development of
language and speech.
- Students with hearing problems may
have both experiential and language
deficiencies. Because they do not hear
environmental noises and day-to-day
conversations, hearing-impaired children miss a
great deal of crucial information usually
learned incidentally by non-hearing-impaired
children. Although students can overcome some of
these problems to varying degrees through great
investments of time, energy, and effort by
parents and educators, such deficiencies
continue to be fairly common within the hearing
impaired population.
- Not all deaf students are fluent
users of all of the communication modes used
across the deaf community, just as
users of spoken language are not fluent in all
oral languages. For example, not all deaf
students lip-read; many use sign language - but
there are several types of sign language
systems. Finger-spelling is the use of the
manual alphabet to form words.
- Pidgin Sign English (PSE) combines
aspects of ASL and English and is used in
educational situations often combined
with speech. Nearly every spoken language has an
accompanying sign language.
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