Effects of a prosody rehabilitation program on expression of affect in preschool children with hearing impairment: a randomized trial

Abstract

Background Children with hearing impairment are deprived of their source of linguistic input which in turn leads to linguistic and prosodic deficits that negatively affect language and social development. Linguistic aspects other than prosody have received considerable attention in studies concerned with hearing-impaired children with little literature addressing how to improve their affective prosodic deficits. The aim of the current study is to adapt and apply the “prosody treatment program” and detect the effect of prosodic rehabilitation on affect production and language development in Egyptian hearing-impaired children. This study was conducted on 21 children with sensorineural hearing loss. The subjects were randomly divided into two groups, group A (cases) and group B (control) by block randomization. The subjects of the study were evaluated pre and post-therapy by a protocol for assessment of their prosodic skills using subjective and objective measures. Both groups received the usual auditory and language rehabilitation therapy. The case group additionally received rehabilitation for prosody using the “prosody treatment program” for 3 months. Results Results showed a statistically significant improvement in the subjective scores and most of the objective scores of the assessed affective prosodic skills when comparing pre-therapy and post-therapy scores in the cases group, and when comparing both studied groups post-therapy. Conclusions Prosodic training has an additional benefit evident in improving affective prosodic skills of hearing-impaired children compared to conventional therapy alone with a positive effect on their linguistic development. Trial registration The trial is registered at www.clinicaltrials.govNCT04691830. Registered under the name “Adaptation of a Rehabilitation Program for Prosody and its Application on Egyptian Hearing Impaired Children”. Retrospectively registered: