From screening to early identification and intervention: Discovering predictors to successful outcomes for children with significant hearing loss

This article summarizes the research findings from a longitu-dinal study of the language, speech, and social-emotional de-velopment of children who are deaf and hard of hearing, all of whom have hearing parents. This series of studies, from 1994 to the present, investigated predictors of successful develop-mental outcomes. The article provides information about how the findings of these studies relate to the existing literature. A description of the Colorado Home Intervention Program (CHIP) in which the participants were enrolled is also pro-vided. During the course of these investigations, universal newborn hearing screening programs were established in Col-orado, changing the age of identification of hearing loss and initiation into intervention in this program geared to families with infants and toddlers, birth through three years of age, from an average of 20 months of age to 2 months of age. Lan