Ciwa Griffiths

Griffiths died on 3 December 2003 in Laguna Hills, California, Orange County, California.

When Griffiths realized that the first months of life were crucial for normal hearing development, she began to advocate general hearing tests for newborns in 1964. She created the blueprint for California's first neonatal hearing screening program in 1966 and continued to do so until the State of California passed legislation in 1984 (Legislative Mandates) and 1998 making hearing screening at birth mandatory. In a similar study conducted by otologist Arpad Götze at the ENT Clinic of the Janos Hospital in Budapest, Hungary from 1978 to1981 with 68 deaf infants, 51 (75%) developed normal hearing. In 12 infants, hearing did not improve, 10 of them only wore the hearing aid from 10 months, and in the remaining 5 the results could not be followed up.

In 1955, she received her doctorate in education from the University of Southern California.

In 1954 she founded the Hear Foundation in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, California. Later, the Foundation was renamed Hear Center and moved to her home in Pasadena, California.

In the 1950s, she began using bilateral (two hearing aids) full-time amplification for deaf babies and infants. She provided hearing aids to babies as young as one month old. At that time, it was thought that hearing aids could not be given to children under six years of age. However, her observations and experience showed that residual hearing could be optimized to allow integration into the natural environment and mainstream schooling. Improved audiometry in the 1980s found that 97% of the students in schools for the deaf had enough residual hearing to benefit from hearing aids and speech education. It was also in favour of the intensive involvement of parents, that they were informed, committed and consistent in their hearing education. In the 1970s, she organized the world's first two international conferences on the use of hearing technology for deaf children. This resulted in a new organisation, the Auditory-Verbal International (AVI) (today AG Bell Academy).

In the 1950s, when providing deaf infants with bilateral hearing aids, Griffiths discovered that the hearing aids could be discontinued after a few months because the infants had now developed normal hearing ability. There were exceptions that still needed to be fitted with hearing aids because of neural defects (rubella, meningitis, heredity). Their clinical study of 21 deaf infants from 1969 to 1973 showed that 67% of the infants who participated in the study and were fitted with hearing aids by the age of 8 months developed normal hearing, while this was not the case in any of the infants who received hearing aids only after 8 months.

In 1937 she began teaching in a one-room school in Monterey County, California where a deaf child gave the impetus for her to turn to education for the deaf. Previously, she had obtained credential admission to elementary school at San Francisco State College. In 1940-1941, she studied at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Massachusetts, received a Master of Science degree from the University of Massachusetts and was admitted to teach the deaf at the Clarke School. She trained in pedaudiology with Edith Whetnall at the Audiology Unit of the Royal National Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital in London in 1954. There she was able to observe for the first time how deaf children could learn to speak normally with amplification combined with auditory-verbal therapy if one started with it in the first three years.

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from San Francisco State College in 1932. In the midst of the Depression she found no work until Roosevelt founded the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Ciwa Griffiths (1 February 1911 – 3 December 2003) was an American speech therapist and pioneer of auditory-verbal therapy and universal neonatal hearing screening.

Griffiths was born in Suva, Fiji. She was the ninth of ten children. Her mother Jennie Scott Wilson, a feminist and pacifist, was born in Texas and her father, Arthur George Griffiths, in Fiji. Her grandfather, George Littleton Griffiths had founded the Fiji Times in Levuka in 1869, where her mother worked as a reporter and wrote the editorials. The family lived in Suva, Sydney, Brisbane, Texas, California and experienced the hard times of the two world wars and the Great Depression.