INTRODUCTION: Children with severe hearing loss have a delay in the vocabulary repertoire compared to the normal-hearing children of the same chronological age. One of the factors considered to be basic during the process of language development is the family intervention. OBJECTIVE: To propose a program controlled for guiding of parents of children using cochlear implant (CIC) and verify the effectiveness of the program through the variation of the children's lexical performance. METHOD: Prospective study. Eight CIC and their respective families took part in the research and were divided into two groups: GI (with guiding program) and GII (without guiding program). The lexical performance of the children was measured through the List of Evaluation of Expressive Vocabulary (LAVE) with prior and posterior guiding program. The guiding program Participative Family for CIC was composed by four sessions, of weekly application, with duration of 60 minutes each. The topics approached were development of auditory and linguistic skills. RESULTS: The intra-groups ANOVAs didn't present a different significant performance in LAVE for the prior and posterior guiding comparison of both groups. The ANOVAs between groups didn't reveal a statistically significant difference between the groups for lexical performance. CONCLUSION: The groups didn't differ in the effectiveness of the program as measured by LAVE. Such results must be an important indicator of lexical evolution measures based only on the family perception. In future studies the program temporal extension, sample expansion and objective measures of the lexical development must be taken into account.
cochlear implant; language development; language; child language
