There are a variety of ways to help children with hearing loss express themselves and interact with others. The main options are listed below. The option you choose will depend on how you want your child to learn and communicate. Find out about all of the choices and talk to lots of experts.
- Oral/Auditory options combine hearing, lip-reading, and hearing devices such as hearing aids and cochlear implants. The goals of oral/auditory options are to help children develop speech and English-language skills.
- American Sign Language (ASL) is a language used by some deaf children and their families. ASL consists of hand signs, body movements, facial expressions, and gestures. It's a language with its own grammar and syntax, which are different from English. ASL has no written form.
- Cued speech is a system that uses handshapes in different locations along with the natural mouth movements to represent speech sounds. Watching the mouth movements and the handshapes can help some children learn to speech-read English; this is especially important in discriminating between sounds that sound different but look the same on the lips.
- Signed English is a system that uses signs to represent words or phrases in the English language. Signed English is designed to enhance the use of both spoken and written English.
- Combined options use portions of the various methods listed above. For example, some deaf children who use oral/auditory options also learn sign language. Children who use ASL also learn to read and write in English. Combined options can expose children who are deaf or hard of hearing to many different ways to communicate and express themselves.
