This report summarizes some of the results of studies in our laboratory exploring the development of cognitive, reading and prosodic skills in children with cochlear implantation (CI). The children with CI performed at significantly lower levels than the hearing comparison group on the majority of cognitive tests, despite showing levels of nonverbal ability. The differences between children with CI and hearing children were most pronounced on tasks with relatively high phonological processing demands, but they were not limited to phonological processing. Impairment of receptive and productive prosody was also evident in children with CI. Despite these difficulties, 75% of the children with CI reached a level of reading skill comparable to that of hearing children. The results are discussed with respect to compensation strategies in reading.

Observational learning is a successful method for improving writing skills in various genres. We explore effects of a five lesson intervention series based on peer observation. Fifty-five Swedish 5th-grade students aged 10-12 years followed this intervention programme. The students watched short film clips with peers working with texts. Each lesson was organised according to a theme: reader's perception of the text, ordering of events, how to begin a story, how to end a story and how to edit a text. The students wrote four texts during the intervention. The quality of these texts was assessed by a panel of trained raters. Additionally, the language and reading comprehension and working memory capacity were tested. The results show that average text quality had significantly improved at the end of the intervention, and that this improvement was modulated by reading and language comprehension. Three months later, however, text quality was significantly decreased.

Twenty 10- to 18-year-old children and adolescents with varying degrees of hearing impairment (HI) and hearing aids (HA), ranging from mild-moderate to severe, produced picture-elicited narratives in a spoken and written version. Their performance was compared to that of 63 normally hearing (NH) peers within the same age span. The participants with HI and NH showed similar patterns regarding intragroup correlations between corresponding measures of spoken and written narratives. However, the participants with HI had significantly less diverse language than the NH group. The participants with poorer hearing (higher best ear hearing level [BEHL]) produced spoken and written narratives comprising more content words and they also produced written narratives that were less lexically diverse than the participants with better hearing (lower BEHL). The difference as to lexical skills emphasizes the importance of focusing on these skills in the group of children with HI. However, the results give support for a quite optimistic view on the development of narration in children with HI with HA, at least for picture-elicited narratives.

The purpose of the study was to explore the narrative writing of 18 children, ages 11 to 19, with severe and profound hearing impairment who had cochlear implants (CI), compared with the performance of hearing children. Nine of the 18 children had prelingual deafness and 9 children had postlingual deafness. The hearing impairment was progressive in 11 children. The participants thus formed a heterogeneous group, which was split in two ways: according to age at testing and age at implantation. The narratives were collected by means of keystroke logging. The difference between the children with CI and the hearing children was most prominent for two measures: the percentage of pause time (in the group of children older than 13 years) and lexical density. Furthermore, the children implanted after 5 years of age performed more like the hearing children. This group consisted of children with postlingual deafness and also of children who were deafened progressively. Our interpretation is that these children benefited from the early linguistic input. Taking the whole group of participants into consideration, the results reflect linguistic and cognitive processing limitations in complex linguistic tasks like narration for the children with CI in comparison with their hearing peers.

This study examined the relationship between speech recognition, working memory and conversational skills in a group of 13 children/adolescents with cochlear implants (CIs) between 11 and 19 years of age. Conversational skills were assessed in a referential communication task where the participants interacted with a hearing peer of the same age and gender. The measures were the number of requests for clarifi cation produced, time used to solve the task and the proportion of the different types of requests for clarifi cation made by the participants with CIs. The results revealed that speech recognition correlated signifi cantly with the general measures of conversational skills (time to solve the task and the total number of requests for clarifi cation used). General working memory was associated with certain types of requests for clarifi cation. The participants with better working memory capacity used more requests for confi rmation of new information (i.e. made more suggestions of their own) and fewer requests for confi rmation of already given information compared to the participants with poorer working memory. It thus seems as if both speech recognition and working memory contribute to conversational skills but in different ways. Ibertsson et al. 134 The test requires repetition of spoken sentences presented in background noise and performance is scored in terms of speech to noise ratio (SNR).Working memory capacity refers to the memory system responsible for simultaneous storage and processing of information over a brief period of time (Baddeley, 2000). This capacity is fully developed at the end of adolescence (Gathercole, 1999). In the present work, working memory capacity was assessed with three tasks. One measure was used to assess the capacity to store and process information simultaneously, and two were used to examine a subcomponent of working memory, the phonological short-term memory (Gathercole and Baddeley, 1990). There is today evidence that a CI promotes a different course of cognitive development, for example, working memory, for deaf children than would have been possible without CIs. For example, Dillon and Pisoni (2004) conclude that a CI facilitates the development of processes such as inner speech and verbal rehearsal in working memory. The simultaneous processing and storage of information, or general working memory (Just and Carpenter, 1992;Towse et al., 1998), were assessed with the Competing Language Processing Task (CLPT; Gaulin and Campbell, 1994; Swedish version by Pohjanen and Sandberg, 1999). The second test, created to examine phonological short-term memory, is a non-word repetition test (Sahlén et al., 1999). Non-words do not have lexical representations, and repetition skills are therefore relatively independent of lexical knowledge in long-term memory. However, according to Sahlén et al. (1999), in children with verbal output constraints and/or reduced hearing, repetition tests should be used together with a test assessing the ability to discriminate phonemes. A non-word ...