KU gets $1.25M grant to help children who are deaf and blind communicate

LAWRENCE -- Researchers at the University of Kansas Life Span Institute will adapt and test a communication strategy for children who have both deaf-blindness and cognitive disabilities with a $1.25 million Department of Education grant.

"Children with deaf-blindness often have little or no communication -- no way to control their world," said Susan Bashinski, research assistant professor, who will co-direct the five-year study with Nancy Brady, associate research professor.

An individual may be considered as having deaf-blindness even if he or she has some limited function in hearing and vision abilities that cannot be corrected to normal limits.

Deaf-blindness is rare, with only about 12,000 children and youths affected nationwide, and in Kansas, about 134. Children who have both deaf-blindness and cognitive disabilities are even more rare and are among those most in need of research-validated treatments, according to Bashinski.

Bashinski and Brady, along with Joan Houghton, project coordinator, compose the team of researchers who will adapt a communication strategy called Prelinguistic Milieu Training. PMT was developed to improve the communication of children with cognitive disabilities by Steven Warren, director of the Life Span Institute, and Paul Yoder, a professor at Vanderbilt University, beginning in the early 1990s.

PMT emulates what typically developing babies do -- such as grabbing, pointing and touching -- to begin the exchange with others that is the beginning of intentional communication, Brady explained.

This stage in a child's development of nonsymbolic communication typically occurs before symbolic communication with pictures, letters or objects.

"Physical therapists would never try to teach a child how to walk if she or he hadn't sat up yet," Brady pointed out, but speech clinicians often try to teach a child with deaf-blindness and cognitive disabilities to communicate using Braille or sign language even if they aren't gesturing."

In PMT, the adult follows the child's lead in an activity that a child enjoys, such as rocking on a toy horse, then looks for cues that the child wants to continue the activity, such as a rocking gesture, Brady explained. "Eventually the child may learn to request the activity by producing the gesture," she said.

The Brady-Bashinski study will adapt PMT for children who are deaf-blind by relying more on hand-under-hand support and touch and object cues.

"We might give a child a card with a piece of rubber tread on it that she could use to ask for a ride in a tire swing, or a backpack strap could be used to signal that it was time to go home," Bashinski explained. "Such textural and object cues can be critically important communication elements for children with deaf-blindness."

Twenty-seven children, ages 3 to 7, will be recruited, beginning with 18 in northeast Kansas. The study will be replicated in the Wichita area with three children and with six children in Indiana through collaboration with Indiana State University. Although by most standards this is a small sample, it is large for a study of children with deaf-blindness, Brady said.

If the adapted PMT is effective, the researchers will disseminate the results to teachers and clinicians through conferences, technical assistance and publications.

"Professionals may adopt PMT relatively quickly because of the urgent need for effective strategies with children who have deaf-blindness and cognitive disabilities," Bashiniski said.

The Life Span Institute is one of the largest research and development programs in the nation for the prevention and treatment of developmental disabilities, aging, and human and community development.

The institute is looking for children to participate in the initial, northeast Kansas area study. To qualify, the children must be 3 to 7 years of age, must not use speech or an augmentative communication system to interact with others, and must have both a vision and hearing loss. Contact Nancy Brady at (785) 864-0762 or nbrady@ku.edu, or Susan Bashinski at (785) 864-2459 or sbashins@ku.edu. A TTY line is available at (785) 864-3434.