A preliminary account of phonological and morphophonological perception in young children with and without otitis media

Abstract

This investigation examined the effects of otitis media with effusion (OME) and its associated fluctuating conductive hearing loss on the perception of phonological and morphophonological /s/ and /z/ in young children. We predicted that children free of OME (OME-) would perform better than children with histories of OME (OME+). We also predicted that for the OME+ group morphological perception would be harder than phonological perception, because the former category carries an additional linguistic load (i.e., plurality). Sixteen children, ages 26 to 28 months (M = 26.5, SD = 0.6) were divided into two groups, the OME- (n = 8) and OME+ (n = 8) based on OME history during the first year of life. Subjects in the OME- group were free of the disease for 4/5 visits and pure tone average (PTA) was 12.6 dB HL (SD = 4.8). Subjects in the OME+ group had the disease on 3/5 visits and PTA was 23 dB HL (SD = 2.7). Experimental stimuli were six monosyllabic novel word-pairs. Members of each word-pair differed only in the presence of final voiced or voiceless fricative, marking the targets phonologically (e.g., [g [symbol: see text]]/[g [symbol: see text] s] as in 'law', 'loss') or morphophonologically (e.g., [daep]/[daeps] as in 'map' 'maps'). Subjects were taught the unfamiliar word pairs using a fast mapping procedure. Perception was tested with the bimodal preferential looking paradigm. Children in the OME- group performed significantly better than their OME+ counterparts. Individual word-pair analyses showed that OME+ group performed more poorly than the OME- group on one phonological and on two morphological targets, all ending with [s]. For the OME+ group, targets with final [s] posed greater difficulty than those with final [z], especially on morphophonological plural-(s) targets. The results suggested that the fluctuating hearing loss associated with OME might have a negative impact on speech perception.

Limiares de audibilidade em altas freqüências em crianças com história de otite média secretora bilateral

“…Petinou et al 16 demonstrated that children aged between 1 and 3 years, diagnosed with hearing loss, show increased language acquisition difficulties, decreased perception of speech sounds containing voiceless or fricative consonants such /s/ and /z/, and frequent phonetic errors when pronouncing /l/ and /r/.17 According to the authors the most common cause is mild conductive hearing loss -which may be unilateral -resulting from otitis media. Paradise18 noted that during these infections sound stimuli are distorted, which could explain the phonetic errors.…”

Children with Minimal Conductive Hearing Impairment: Speech Comprehension in Noise

“…While some studies show that children with histories of OME have significantly poorer phonological and communication skills than their normally hearing peers [e.g. Miccio et al, 2001;Petinou et al, 2001;Ruben et al, 1997], others did not find any casual relationship between having had episodes of OME and later speech and language development Roberts et al, 1991].…”

A diagnostic marker for speech delay associated with otitis media with effusion: the intelligibility‐speech gap

“…Recent examples include studies by research groups in New York City (e.g. Mody and Schwartz, 1999;Petinou, Schwartz, Mody and Gravel, 1999;Petinou, Schwartz, Gravel and Raphael, 2001), State College, PA (e.g. Miccio, Yont, Davie and Vernon-Feagans, 1999;Miccio, Gallagher, Grossman, Yont and Vernon-Feagans, 2001) and Calgary-Montreal (e.g.…”