A Comparison of Phonological Processing and Sentence Comprehension of Normal Hearing Children and Those with Cochlear Implant Experience

Abstract

Background and Objective: The purpose of the present study is to investigate the phonological processing and sentence comprehension in children with CIs and compare them with normal hearing (NH) children. It is also an attempt to study the relation between phonological processing and sentence comprehension in children with CIs. Methods: Twenty children with CIs and twenty NH children between the ages 4 to 6 years were evaluated with the Non-Word Repetition (NWR) task ; Persian Syntax Comprehension Test (PSCT); Persian version of Test of Language Development, Primary, 3rd (TOLD-P: 3); nonverbal part of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) test; and Vineland adaptive-behavior scale. Results: These results implied that children with CIs may experience difficulties in phonological processing and sentence comprehension. In children with CIs, with increasing their experience in processing of sound, sentence comprehension skills improved. Conclusion: The findings of the present study demonstrated that there is a relationship between the NWR and sentence comprehension. Therefore, paying more attention to the intervention of phonological processing may help children with CIs in sentence comprehension.

Language profile of children with cochlear implants: comparative study about the effect of age of cochlear implantation and the duration of rehabilitation

“…This study showed also that children with CI did not perform as well as normal children in the subtest of sentence comprehension which was in line with other studies that were implemented in this respect [17,18]. Our results indicated that children with CI have difficulties in sentence comprehension which may be due to deprivation of phonemic The poor results of the word and sentence repetition subtest in children with CI under this study could reflect the insufficient underlying mechanisms of the repetition task which includes access and integration of word meanings, and syntactic processing.…”

Effect of cochlear implantation on language development and assessment of the quality of studies in this field: A systematic review

“…Another study in this area indicates that the understanding and expression "passive verb" in CI children is considerably weaker than NH children (31). The results of the study of sentence comprehension skills suggest that children with CI have phonological processing and sentence comprehension impairments, but by improving the experience in sound processing, the sentence comprehension improves (40). A study for the morpho-syntactic skills of these children showed that children are able to express simple structure, but in using complex structures, they…”

“…Four articles focused on phonology (phonology awareness skills) (29,34,35,38). Another four articles concentrated on grammatical skills (understanding and expressing passive verbs and MLU (mean length of utterance) indices, morpho-syntactic abilities and sentence comprehension) as well as some semantic skills (NDW (number of different words)/NTW (number of total words) indices and TTR (Type-Token Ratio)) (31,36,40,42). One article reviewed spoken and written narrative abilities (41) and two studies check out reading skills (33,39).…”

“…The rest of the tests were also valid. In terms of normality and cut point only one test in phonological awareness field (29,34,37,38), one test on the perception of passive verbs (31) and TOLD test (30,38,40) met the required condition.…”