Linguistic Performance of Hard-of-Hearing and Normal-Hearing Children

Abstract

A repetition task was employed to investigate syntactic patterns of hard-of-hearing children. The subjects were 11 students enrolled in public-school classes for the hard-of-hearing. A matching control group of normal-hearing children was selected from the same schools. It was found that both groups tended to use grammatical constructions rather than nongrammatical approximations. The hard-of-hearing group, however, achieved significantly lower means in each grammatical form tested, and tended to substitute simpler forms. This lower level of performance seemed to represent a difference of degree rather than kind, as the experimental group displayed linguistic performance similar to the control group but showed a general delay in language development.

Language Deficits Among Hearing-Impaired Children

“…Unfortunately, the evidence (Clarke and Rogers, 1981) suggests that the delay is never completely closed for most hearing-impaired children. Wilcox and Tobin (1974) showed that a group of 11 children 10 years old, with an average loss of 61 dB, had particular difficulty processing some aspects of sentence structure. In particular, certain auxiliary verb forms, passives, and negative passives were difficult for them to comprehend.…”

Ensuring Accuracy of the Pediatric Hearing Aid Fitting

“…It is during this period that infants will construct meaningful representations from audible sequences of sounds. Furthermore, the young child will be required to accurately reproduce sequences of speech sounds in order to communicate with others (Wilcox and Tobin, 1974;Robinshaw, 1995;Downs and YoshinagaItano, 1999). It has been widely documented that children with hearing loss do not acquire speech and language skills comparable to normal hearing peers (Davis et al, 1986;Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1988;Geers and Moog, 1989;Blamey et al, 2001).…”