Despite modern hearing aids, children with hearing impairment often have only restricted access to spoken language input during the 'critical' years for language acquisition. Specifically, a sensorineural hearing impairment affects the perception of voiceless coronal consonants which realize verbal affixes in German. The aim of this study is to explore if German hearing-impaired children have problems in producing and/or acquiring inflectional suffixes expressed by such phonemes. The findings of two experiments (an elicitation task and a picture-naming task) conducted with a group of hearing-impaired monolingual German children (age 3-4 years) demonstrate that difficulties in perceiving specific phonemes relate to the avoidance of these same sounds in speech production independent of the grammatical function these phonemes have.

Many hard-of-hearing children show delays or disorders in the acquisition of morphology and syntax. There is an on-going discussion how these difficulties are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The article focuses on coronal consonants that function as suffixes in the German verbal inflectional system. Here we present a new test we developed to evaluate the ability to discriminate these consonants in syllabic offset positions. A pilot study with 22 hearing-impaired (HI) children and 15 typically developing (TD) children reveals significantly lower discrimination scores in the HI group. The results highlight the necessity to measure the capacity to distinguish particular phonemes at specific syllable positions, when considering the impact of a hearing impairment on language acquisition.

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