Brazilian scale of hearing and language development in children (EDAL-1) with cochlear implant and less than two years of hearing AGE.

OBJECTIVE

To present the protocol called the Brazilian Scale of Hearing and Language Development.

MATERIALS AND

METHODS

This is a protocol developed in order to assess and record the development of hearing and language skills in young children who have undergone cochlear implantation during the first two years of hearing age. It was applied to the parents of 41 children over a period of 12 months at the cochlear implant clinic in the Pequeno Príncipe Hospital in Curitiba, Brazil. Registered were: the time taken to implement the protocol; ease of understanding the questions; numerical results obtained by the children evaluated.

RESULTS

In general, the questions were considered easy to understand. The minimum time taken for application of the protocol was two minutes and the maximum was 11 minutes. At the end of the evaluation, it was possible to quantify the development in 100% of the cases.

CONCLUSIONS

EDAL proved an agile, quick and easy, instrument to be used in the first two years of hearing age.