The Role of the Audiologist in Verbal-Auditory Therapy

Auditory-verbal therapy is an early intervention approach for children with hearing loss and their families. Families are guided in the daily use of strategies, conditions and procedures that facilitate the optimal development of their children's listening and spoken language skills to promote lifelong success in learning, literacy and social communication. As a practitioner of auditory-verbal therapy, an audiologist and speech-language therapist is a teacher of individuals with hearing difficulties who follow the auditory principles of language and speech. Because the results of Auditory-Verbal therapy depend on high-quality auditory access, the audiologist plays an important role in auditory-verbal therapy by ensuring that infants and children with hearing loss have excellent auditory access to all speech sounds so that they can hear, process and learn spoken language. Simply put, achieving desired results in auditory-verbal therapy largely depends on an effective and collaborative relationship between parent, audiologist, and therapist.