A comparison of maternal and child language in normally-hearing and hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants

Abstract

The present study examines the amount of input and output in congenitally hearing-impaired children with a cochlear implant (CI) and normally-hearing children (NH) and their normally-hearing mothers. The aim of the study was threefold: (a) to investigate the input provided by the two groups of mothers, (b) to investigate the output of the two groups of children, and (c) to investigate the influence of the mothers’ input on child output and expressive vocabulary size. Mothers are less influenced by their children’s hearing status than the children are: CI children are more talkative and slower speakers. Mothers influenced their children on most parameters, but strikingly, it was not maternal talkativeness as such, but the number of maternal turns that is the best predictor of a child’s expressive vocabulary size.

The influence of socio-economic status on mothers’ volubility and responsiveness in a monolingual Dutch-speaking sample

“…There are ample indications in this direction: the lowSES caregivers participating in the current study took significantly fewer turns than did their mhSES counterparts. The number of caregiver turns is a solid predictor of children’s expressive vocabulary sizes at 21 months of age (Vanormelingen, De Maeyer, & Gillis, in press), and general language development as assessed by standardized tests (Gilkerson & Richards, 2009). And, indeed, lowSES children have been found to have significantly smaller vocabularies (Fernald et al, 2013).…”

Parental Use of Multimodal Cues in the Initiation of Joint Attention as a Function of Child Hearing Status

“…Hearing parents typically rely on spoken language (produced in the auditory modality) to communicate with their hearing children. Research has shown that the hearing parents of deaf children who have received cochlear implants provide comparable amounts of spoken language input to their child as do hearing parents of hearing children (Vanormelingen et al, 2016). Of course, the point of an implant is to help deaf children hear and thus learn spoken language, so this is not entirely surprising.…”

Expressive Vocabulary Growth After Pediatric Auditory Brainstem Implantation in Two Cases' Spontaneous Productions: A Comparison With Children With Cochlear Implants and Typical Hearing

“…Cumulative vocabulary is a standard measure to estimate children's vocabulary growth in longitudinal, spontaneous data [e.g., (18, 33, 34)]. It is determined by counting the number of new words in each consecutive data file.…”