Abstract:

Background:
Shared book reading, as an interactive and communicative context, enhances the cognitive, emotional and communicative development of children, favoring development of language inside of the family context. Maternal conversational sensitivity is also associated with better linguistic development of children with Cochlear Implant (CI) (Quittner et al., 2013). The CI can provide deaf children a good opportunity to develop language skills, but the serious difficulties persist in early social experiences and language-mediated interaction, given that families must adapt to deafness of their daughter or son, and enrich communication (Rinaldi et al., 2013).

Aim:
Describe the conversational sensitivity of mothers of children with CI during the skared book reading.

Methodology:
The design of this study is: cross-sectional observational. Participants: 18 dyads mother-children with CI. 18 hearing mothers between 19-43years old and 18 children between 3-6years old. Instrument: Maternal sensitivity was observed by the Bakar et al. (2010) maternal sensitivity scale, with was previously used in an investigation with deaf children with CI. For this, an audio-visual recording of a controlled interaction in the family context of each mother-children dyad. The interaction was the shared book reading of a story called “The Nil and his new toy”.

Results:
The results show that there is a bivariate correlation between the frequency of story reading and maternal sensitivity.

Conclusion:
It is essential to keep researching into the interactions on the family context and the enhancing factors of language in parents. These results encourange the strengthening of the type of interaction in the family context, with could mean an improvement in the development of children with CI. Thus, we can continue to guide and deliver guidelines to families and the team of therapist.

Keywords:

Cochlear implant, maternal conversational sensitivity, dyads mother-children, book reading.