City Research Online

Abstract

Infant–parent interaction forms the foundation for language learning. For the majority of deaf infants, hearing loss can impact access to, and the quality of communicative interactions, placing language development at risk. Support for families to meet the challenges faced during interaction is highly variable in the United Kingdom. In a step towards more standardized but tailorable family support, we co-produced an instructional, video-based intervention, testing for feasibility in terms of behavior change in seven communicative strategies and acceptability with 9 parents, forming study 1. Parents increased their use of the majority of behaviors and found content and delivery acceptable. However, further development was required to: (a) support use of semantically contingent talk and attention getting strategies to elicit infant attention, and (b) ensure the information was provided in a bite-size format that could be tailored to individual families. In study 2, the intervention was refined based on findings from study 1 and assessed for acceptability with 9 parents and 17 professionals, who reported similar high acceptability scores. Final refinements and modifications could be addressed in future interventions. The current studies provide a positive early step towards a standardized intervention to support communication that could be used in routine practice.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Publisher Keywords:	intervention; deaf; hard of hearing; hearing loss; infant; infant–parent interaction
Subjects:	R Medicine > RJ Pediatrics > RJ101 Child Health. Child health services
Departments:	School of Health & Psychological Sciences > Language & Communication Science
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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