The Efficacy of the Cycles Phonological Remediation Approach for A Child with Hearing Loss

The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of the Cycles Phonological Remediation Approach (CPRA) on improving the speech intelligibility of a hearing-impaired Mandarin-speaking child with a severe speech sound disorder (SSD). In this case study, a four-year-and-7-month-old preschooler was diagnosed as an acoustic neuroma at the age of 3 years, and consequently had severe sensorineural hearing loss with fluctuating thresholds and developed highly unintelligible speech. The child with bimodal stimulation participated in the CPRA program in four cycles with a total of 66 hours of remediation over a period of 1.5 years. The results indicated that the child had exhibited a significant improvement on her speech between pre- and post-treatment evaluation. To assess the child's speech intelligibility, the continuous speech samples of free talking and story retelling was used. Intelligibility based speech samples by three unfamiliar listeners was 75%. The CPRA as well as the hearing technology can be efficacious in modifying a child’s speech intelligibility.