User:CVHWI/Prelingual deafness

Lead (Reorganized):

Prelingual deafness refers to deafness that occurs before learning speech or language. Speech and language typically begin to develop very early with infants saying their first words by age one. Therefore, prelingual deafness is considered to occur before the age of one, where a baby is either born deaf (known as congenital deafness) or loses hearing before the age of one. This hearing loss may occur for a variety of reasons and impacts cognitive, social, and language development.

Statistical Data (fact checked and added information):

There are approximately 12,000 children with hearing loss in the United States. Profound hearing loss occurs in somewhere between 4 and 11 per every 10,000 children. According to the CDC, of the 3,742,608 babies screened, 3,896 were diagnosed with hearing loss before the age of three months in 2017. 1.7 out of 1000 births were diagnosed with hearing loss in the United States.

Causes (Reorganized):

Prelingual hearing loss can be considered congenital, present at birth, or acquired, occurring after birth before the age of one. Congenital hearing loss can be a result of maternal factors (rubella, cytomegalovirus, or herpes simplex virus, syphilis, diabetes), infections, toxicity (pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, other drugs), asphyxia, trauma, low birth weight,prematurity and complications associated with the Rh factor in the blood/jaundice. These nongenetic factors account for about one fourth of the congenital hearing losses in infants while genetic factors account for over half of the infants with congenital hearing loss. Most of genetic factors are caused by an autosomal recessive hearing loss or an autosomal dominant hearing loss. Autosomal recessive hearing loss is when both parents carry the recessive gene, and pass it on to their child. The autosomal dominant hearing loss is when an abnormal gene from one parent is able to cause hearing loss even though the matching gene from the other parent is normal. This can lead to genetic syndromes, such as Down syndrome, Usher syndrome or Waardenburg syndrome, which are concomitant with hearing loss. Acquired hearing loss can be the result of toxicity (drugs given as treatment when in the neonatal intensive care unit) and infections such as meningitis.

Speech and Language Acquisition:

Deaf children do not acquire spoken language the same as hearing children because they cannot hear the language input around them. Spoken language is based on combining speech sounds to form words which are then organized by grammatical rules in order to convey a message. This message is language. In normal language acquisition, auditory comprehension of speech sounds precedes the development of language. Without auditory input, a person with prelingual deafness is forced to acquire speech visually through lip-reading. Acquiring spoken language through lip-reading alone is challenging for the deaf child because it does not always accurately represent speech sounds. The likelihood of a deaf child successfully learning to speak is based on a variety of factors including: ability to discriminate between speech sounds, a higher than average non-verbal IQ, and a higher socioeconomic status. Despite being fitted with hearing aids or provided with oral instruction and speech therapy at a young age, prelingually deaf children are unlikely to ever develop perfect speech and speech-reception skills. Some researchers conclude that deaf children taught exclusively through spoken language appear to pass through the same general stages of language acquisition as their hearing peers but without reaching the same ultimate level of proficiency. Spoken language that may develop for prelingually deaf children is severely delayed.