Objective: Education of deaf children began in Europe for more than four centuries ago . Modern aural Rehabilitation with emphasis on hearing dates. backs to the last two decades. In Iran Baghcheban began deaf education 80 years ago by sign language but new methods of aural habilitation have been used in the last decade. Presently, aural habilitation is being done in sporadic nonorganized style.In fact we’d like to find that do hard of hearing children achieve oral communication ,and wether this achievement is equal among them or not .The other question is that does oral communication development in these children compareable with normal hearing children ?
Materials & Methods: As newborn hearing screening was not being done in our country, the number of hearing impaired children who were detected below 2 years old wich were very limited, so randomized sampling was not possible.This research was designed as a semi experimental Prospective survey on 9 sever to profound hearing impaired infants below 2 years old. They were under aural rehabilitation for 2/5-3 years. Their auditory speech and language development were assessed by data of therapist reports,video tape and recording tapes every 3-6months .Their speech were analized and mid length utterance was determind in each case in compare with normal hearing children in the same age .
Results: Our experiments between 1379-84 ( Hijri solar ) indicated that these children achieve oral communication but not in the same level. 8 children achieved acceptable oral communication . One case has favorable auditory development ,but his speech is relatively poor .According to our study MLUw was 3/11 (normal 4), MLUm 3/66 (normal 7/5). It shows that hearing impaired children achieved compareable MLUw but not MLUm .
Conclusion:Timely aural rehabilitation result in oral communication development but this is affected by several factors . These factors can be divided into general and specific factors , and both of them should be considered in new design of aural habilitation centers .