Long-term effects of auditory training in severely or profoundly deaf children

Despite new technological advances in the rehabilitation of audition in profoundly deaf children, auditory training remains a fundamental part of their education. Consequently, it is necessary to learn what kind of stimuli, what kind of auditory tasks, and what kind of learning procedures generate faster and more long-lasting benefits. The present study evaluates a training program that includes numerous nonlinguistic stimuli that tap into several means of cognitive processing. The program is based on an implicit learning procedure and was tested with six severely or profoundly deaf children. The first results demonstrate an improvement in nonlinguistic performances on both accuracy and processing times. These results were evident immediately after the auditory training, and most of the effects remains stable 6 months later. Moreover, the children show a better discrimination of linguistic sounds. These results open the possibility of new approaches in speech therapy.