Inflectional morphology in German hearing-impaired children

Abstract

Despite modern hearing aids, children with hearing impairment often have only restricted access to spoken language input during the 'critical' years for language acquisition. Specifically, a sensorineural hearing impairment affects the perception of voiceless coronal consonants which realize verbal affixes in German. The aim of this study is to explore if German hearing-impaired children have problems in producing and/or acquiring inflectional suffixes expressed by such phonemes. The findings of two experiments (an elicitation task and a picture-naming task) conducted with a group of hearing-impaired monolingual German children (age 3-4 years) demonstrate that difficulties in perceiving specific phonemes relate to the avoidance of these same sounds in speech production independent of the grammatical function these phonemes have.

Children steer the inflectional diversity of their parents: The role of word births and growing vocabulary

“…The way they receive morphological input is important for children with a hearing impairment, as they tend to struggle more with grammatical development than children with normal hearing. For instance, German hearing-impaired children with acoustic hearing aids have issues with finite verb forms when they are inflected with -s and -t. This probably reflects their problematic perception of the specific phonemes of those inflectional affixes, as these phonemes fall in the frequency range that is affected by their hearing impairment (Penke et al, 2014). Children who are implanted with a CI also score worse than their NH peers for measures of inflectional morphology (Davies et al, 2020;Faes et al, 2015).…”

L2 irregular verb morphology: Exploring behavioral data from intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language using generalized mixed effects models

“…Over the last two decades, German irregular verb morphology has been explored from various perspectives. Data come from behavioral L1 studies of both children and adult speakers (Clahsen, Hadler, & Weyerts, 2004;Smolka, Zwitserlood, & Rösler, 2007), impaired speakers studies (Marusch, von der Malsburg, Bastiaanse, & Burchert, 2012;Penke, Wimmer, Hennies, Hess, & Rothweiler, 2014), electrophysiological studies (Smolka, Khader, Wiese, Zwitserlood, & Rösler, 2013), neuroimaging (Lück, Hahne, & Clahsen, 2006), constructivist neural network modelling (Ruh & Westermann, 2008) and corpus studies (Köpcke, 1998). The above studies focus on processing differences, reporting and discussing possible evidence for qualitatively distinct mechanisms of inflection.…”

Trend: Die Sprache in den Fokus rücken - Sprachtherapie bei Kindern mit Hörschädigung

“…B. Penke, Wimmer, Hennies, Hess & Rothweiler, 2016). Damit für Kinder mit einer Hörschädigung jedoch eine Teilhabe an unserer mehrheitlich lautsprachlich orientierten Gesellschaft möglich ist, sollten sie beim Vorliegen einer Sprachentwicklungsstörung eine spezifische Sprachtherapie erhalten, um im Lautspracherwerb bestmöglich unterstützt zu werden.…”

“…Für die Bereiche Phonetik / Phonologie (Kral, Streicher, Junge & Lang-Roth, 2014) und Lexikon / Semantik (Lund, 2016) sind Entwicklungsdefizite gut dokumentiert und auch im Bereich Morphosyntax konnten Defizite festgestellt werden. Beispielsweise ist der Erwerb der Subjekt-Verb-Kongruenz-Morphologie bei Kindern mit Hörschädigung beeinträchtigt, was auf die eingeschränkte Wahrnehmbarkeit der Flexionsmorpheme am Verbauslaut zurückzuführen ist (Penke et al, 2016). Auch hinsichtlich der pragmatischen Entwicklung, welche in den vergangenen Jahren stärker in den Fokus der Forschung gerückt ist, finden sich einige Studien.…”