Interactive Silences: Evidence for Strategies to Facilitate Spoken Language in Children with Hearing Loss

Interactive silences are important strategies that can be implemented by practitioners and parents of children with hearing loss who are learning a spoken language. Types of adult self-controlled pauses and evidence pertaining to the function of those pauses are discussed, followed by a review of advantages to justify implementation of these turn-taking strategies. Practitioners may benefit from self-analyses to ensure that interactive silences facilitate the process of learning a spoken language in clinical and classroom settings. A call for further evidence is made to determine lengths of deliberate pauses that may be particularly advantageous for young children with hearing loss. This is directly relevant to the optimization of auditory-verbal practice. Suggestions for future study into this topic are also provided.