New technology using electrodes or ear probes can quickly detect infants' poor hearing.
The results suggest it does, because the first six months of life seem to be critical to language development. Their ability to speak is still often less clear than normal children's. Christine Yoshinaga-Itano presented the data Saturday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The work was based 368 hearing-impaired children born in Colorado. Only one-quarter of youngsters identified later have vocabulary approaching the normal range, and their use of language is similar to the bottom 10 percent of children with good hearing.