What is the Auditory-Verbal approach?

The Auditory-Verbal approach believes that children with the use of hearing aids or cochlear implants learn language most easily when actively engaged in a relaxed, meaningful one-on-one therapy session with their supportive parents and caregivers. In these one-on-one sessions, the parents/caregiver are active participants who work with the therapist in modeling techniques for stimulating listening, speech, language, and communication through activities which can be used at home and throughout the day. As a team, they plan strategies to integrate listening, speech language, and communication into the family’s daily routines and experiences. Children listen and learn that certain sounds have certain meanings. In this way, they learn to recognize, understand and speak words. This is auditory (listening) and verbal (speaking) communication. Children with hearing impairments can also communicate in this way, however they need help to learn to detect and recognize sounds around them. They must be taught that listening is useful and necessary to verbally communicate. Children with expressive language disorders or children with multiple–handicaps will have accommodations.

Auditory-Verbal therapy progresses through four levels of auditory skills:

       1. Detection: the ability to determine the absence or presence of sound
       2. Discrimination: the ability to perceive differences between sounds
       3. Identification: the ability to label what has been heard by repeating, by
           pointing to or picking up the object representing the word or words, sentence,
           or environmental sound perceived
       4. Comprehension: the ability to understand the meaning of connected language