What do parents and professionals in Pennsylvania want and need to know to support language acquisition in deaf children?

Temple Univ Of The Commonwealth, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

By conventional criteria, nearly all deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children qualify as late talkers, but for different reasons than hearing children. For DHH children, delayed development of a first language (whether spoken or signed) is typically the result of reduced access to linguistic input, which in turn depends on a range of parental decisions and practices, such as the selection and use of appropriate and effective hearing technologies and the language and communication practices used in the child's environment. Parents typically work with professionals in making these decisions, but these professionals typically have limited training and experience supporting language acquisition in DHH children. There is universal agreement that parents should receive comprehensive and unbiased information to support them in these decisions, but at present there is no further guidance about exactly what information they need. Furthermore, after identifying the relevant set of information that should be given to families, we should ideally have a way to evaluate the extent to which parents (and professionals) accurately understand that information. Only then can we be confident that parents are making truly informed decisions. Our Pennsylvania-based team responds to these needs by first talking with inexperienced parents and professionals who are currently attempting to support language acquisition in DHH children, to find out what they want to know. In addition, we talk with experts across the state of Pennsylvania to determine what the experts think that these novices need to know. With support from an Advisory Board that includes diverse professional and lived experience, we identify the information needs that are most prominent and relevant to most children: these will form the core of a resource that allows parents (and professionals) to objectively self-evaluate their understanding of this key information. Because some (though not all) informational claims may be disputed, we conduct a Delphi study with these experts plus an additional group of researchers to identify where there is consensus vs. dispute. We include both types of items in the resource, under the view that users should understand which claims are and are not controversial. Because this is a new approach, we will return to the inexperienced parents and professionals from earlier in the study to get their feedback on the prototype. As a result of this work, we will learn what parents and professionals want to know and what they need to know about supporting language acquisition in DHH children: most of whom qualify as late talkers. We will identify where experts agree and disagree, and we will develop a resource that gauges the extent to which parents and professionals understand what they need to understand in order to make well-informed decisions about supporting the DHH child's language acquisition.