An extensive psychoeducational evaluation was administered to 40 hearing-impaired children to investigate the effects of degree of hearing impairment, age, and other factors on intellectual, social, academic, and language behavior. Although children varied greatly in performance, hearing loss of any degree appeared to affect psychoeducational development adversely, leading to the conclusion that even minimal hearing loss places children at risk for language and learning problems.

Forty children with mild to severe hearing losses were administered a battery of speech and language tasks. The children’s speech was characterized by misarticulation of affricates and fricatives, mild-moderate hoarseness, mild resonance problems, and good intelligibility. Their language samples included syntactic errors, primarily involving the use of bound morphemes and complex sentence structures. The children’s pragmatic errors consisted primarily of providing inadequate or ambiguous information to the listener. These results indicate a consistent pattern of oral communication behavior that reflects the reduction of acoustic input that they experience.

Psychoeducational data were collected from the files of 1,250 hearing-impaired children in Iowa public schools in an effort to identify educational and linguistic profiles related to different degrees of hearing loss. The files of most mildly to moderately hearing-impaired children do not reflect complete assessment of language, academic, or intellectual skills even when support services are being provided. The data reveal deficits that often are inconsistent with the reports and patterns of achievement on which the allocation of support services for hearing-impaired children have been based. The appropriateness of many of the assessment tools in use is questionable.

The Boehm Test of Basic Concepts was administered to 24 hard-of-hearing children and 24 normally hearing children, who ranged in age from six to eight years. The hearing-impaired children were enrolled at least part time in regular public school classrooms. Their responses were analyzed according to age level and degree of hearing loss and compared to norms for normal-hearing children. Results indicate significant differences in knowledge of the concepts tested between children with milder losses and those with moderately severe losses, but no significant differences between younger and older hearing-impaired children. Percentile rankings of raw scores revealed that 75% of the hard-of-hearing children scored at or below the 10th percentile when compared to norms for hearing children their age or younger. Item analysis of the responses indicated poorest performance on time concepts, followed by quantity, miscellaneous, and space concepts, in that order.

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the auditory perceptual abilities of children are characterized by an age-related improvement in duration discrimination. Forty children, ages 4 to 10 years, and 10 adults served as subjects. Difference limens were obtained using a 350-msec broadband noise burst as the standard stimulus in a three-interval forcedchoice paradigm. Data were characterized by significant differences between the performances of the 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds and those of the adults. Acquisition of adult-like discrimination performance was demonstrated between the ages of 8 and 10 years.