Foundations of Aural Rehabilitation: Children, Adults, and their Family Members 5th Edition

Book Preface

What exactly is aural rehabilitation? The answer to this question can conceivably include every aspect of audiology, education, and speech-language pathology for adults and children who have hearing loss and related services for their family members. Under the rubric of aural rehabilitation may fall any of the following topics: identification, quantification, and diagnosis of hearing OUTLINE
loss and other hearing-related communication difficulties, assessment of visual-only and audio-visual speech recognition, selection and fitting of listening devices, speechreading and auditory training, patient and family counseling, psychosocial support, follow-up services, communica-tion strategies training, tinnitus treatment, literacy promotion, speech and language therapy, classroom management, parent instruction, sign language instruction, noise protection, work-place accommodations, and school and nursing home in-services. The threads that run through the various services and that unify them into the discipline of aural rehabilitation include an emphasis on understanding and addressing the needs of patients who have hearing loss and their family members and an emphasis on ensuring that patients and their communication partners achieve maximum communication success in their everyday environments. Aural rehabilitation draws from a variety of disciplines. This text cites literature from the fields of cognitive psychol-ogy, counseling, medicine, occupational therapy, sociolinguistics, second language learning, and general education, as well as audiology, speech-language pathology, and deaf education.

This book presents an evidence-based approach to the discipline of aural rehabilitation, and reviews the scientific underpinnings that underlie much of what occurs in clinical practice. For some readers, Foundations of Aural Rehabilitation: Children, Adults, and Their Family Members may be their only textbook that is entirely devoted to aural rehabilitation, while for others, it may be their first followed by a more advanced class and corresponding textbook. The book can serve as an introduction to aural rehabilitation and as a reference that can be revisited by practicing professionals. It may also serve as a starting point for researchers and scientists. By design, the book is translational and is based on the premise that clinical practice informs sci-entific research and scientific research informs clinical practice.

The book includes a number of case studies, and general demographic, medical, and pop- cultural trends are considered in parallel with corresponding developments in aural rehabilita-tion. Sidebars, illustrations, and chapter inserts provide lively additions to the text and include quotations by patients, professionals, and family members, bulleted points, historical notes, and tangential asides.

New Features

The fifth edition has been reorganized so that after Chapter 1, which is an introductory chap-ter, other chapters are now grouped into three parts. Part 1 concerns the components of an aural rehabilitation plan, Part 2 concerns adults and their family members, and Part 3 concerns children and their parents or guardians. In previous editions, adults and children were consid-ered separately, for each of the services comprised by aural rehabilitation, such as speechreading training and communication strategies training. The presentation has been streamlined, with greater focus on the “take-home message” of current research and its clinical implications. I hope that instructors will find this new organization easier to teach and students will find the materials easier to learn.

This edition includes several new features. For example, much has happened in the last five years in the field of auditory training and Chapter 4 presents a state-of-the-science review of the most current research as well as an overview of what it is like to listen with hearing loss. Chapter 5 concerns audiovisual speech perception, and since this is my area of research expertise, I took special pleasure in updating it, as nothing excites me more than sharing my enthusiasm with students. My goal in writing this chapter (and all the chapters) was to make audiovisual speech perception, as well as all aspects of aural rehabilitation, as interesting and compelling for my readers as it is for me. Chapter 15 presents emerging trends in speech and language therapy, including specific examples of therapy techniques. In this edition, I com-bined Chapters 2 and 11 from the fourth edition so as to consolidate the presentation about aural rehabilitation plans for adults and to minimize redundancies. Finally, this edition has more illustrations and figures than any of the previous editions—I truly believe that a picture is worth a thousand words.

The fifth edition addresses a global audience whenever possible, without sacrificing the im-portance of including information that might be uniquely relevant to students who intend to work in the United States. There are many reasons for this broad focus, including the increas-ing globalization and cross-pollination of speech and hearing services, the mobility of students, and the increased likelihood that they may practice and study in different countries, as well as the advent of telepractice, which means that students may someday provide services via tele-communications to patients living abroad.

Target Audience

The book targets undergraduate students who are in their junior or senior year in a university or postsecondary program and graduate students who are in their first year of graduate train-ing. It can serve as a primary resource for the disciplines of audiology, speech-language pathol-ogy, education of children who are deaf and have hearing loss, and speech and hearing science, and as a supplemental source for training programs in special education, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, psychology, and vocational rehabilitation counseling.
I immensely enjoy hearing from my readers and can be contacted at [email protected].
Nancy Tye-Murray, Professor
Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine
St. Louis, MO