Novel Word Learning in Children With Hearing Impairment

Abstract

This study examined novel word-learning abilities in young school-age children with mild-to-moderate hearing losses. We questioned whether degree of hearing loss or measures of language and phonological processing abilities were more likely to be related to novel word-learning ability. Subjects were 20 children with hearing impairment (M = 9:0) and 20 children with normal hearing (M = 6:5) matched for receptive vocabulary knowledge. Children were administered measures of language and phonological processing. The novel word-learning task consisted of an acquisition and retention phase in which children received a series of trials to learn to produce four novel words. Half of the children with hearing impairment performed comparably to the children with normal hearing on all of the measures obtained, whereas the other 10 children with hearing impairment performed more poorly than the higher functioning children with hearing impairment and all of the children with normal hearing on most of the measures of language, phonological processing, and novel word learning. Degree of hearing loss was not related to language or word-learning abilities. These findings suggest that the population of children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss may contain two distinct groups: a group of normally developing children who have a hearing loss and a group of children with language impairment who have a hearing loss. The implications of this categorization will be discussed.

Expressive vocabulary of children with hearing loss in the first 2 years of life: impact of early intervention

“…[12][13][14][15][16][17] Findings of suboptimal academic skills have been reported in school age children with mild bilateral HL. [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] Other investigators have reported delayed development of vocabulary and speech skills in children with unilateral HL. 36,37 Although it has been reported that children with unilateral rightsided HL have poorer performance on verbal tests than children with left ear unilateral HL, 16 our cohort was too small and diverse to test this hypothesis.…”

Rapid Word-Learning in Normal-Hearing and Hearing-Impaired Children: Effects of Age, Receptive Vocabulary, and High-Frequency Amplification

“…Word-learning may be reduced due to the degree and configuration of hearing loss, nonoptimal hearing aid characteristics, environmental noise, reverberation, and distance from the speaker. Several studies have been conducted to determine the effect of hearing loss on word-learning in children (Gilbertson & Kamhi, 1995;Lederberg, Prezbindowski, & Spencer, 2000;. Gilbertson & Kamhi (1995), for example, investigated the production and perception of nonsense words in 5-to 9-year-old children with normal hearing and in 7-to 10-yearold children with hearing loss.…”

“…Several studies have been conducted to determine the effect of hearing loss on word-learning in children (Gilbertson & Kamhi, 1995;Lederberg, Prezbindowski, & Spencer, 2000;. Gilbertson & Kamhi (1995), for example, investigated the production and perception of nonsense words in 5-to 9-year-old children with normal hearing and in 7-to 10-yearold children with hearing loss. Their results revealed significantly poorer performance by the children with hearing loss for at least 3 of the 4 nonsense words presented.…”

“…These factors may be categorized as internal or external to the child. For example, internal factors include the size of a child's current receptive vocabulary (Gilbertson & Kamhi, 1995;Mervis & Bertrand, 1994;Mervis & Bertrand, 1995), the child's age (Bloom, 2000;Oetting, Rice, & Swank, 1995), awareness of phonemic representations (Briscoe, Bishop, & Norbury, 2001), and working memory capacity (Gathercole, Hitch, Service, & Martin, 1997). Variables external to a child include but are not limited to the number of exposures to a new word (Dollaghan, 1987;Rice, Oetting, Marquis, Bode, & Pae, 1994), the number of new words presented within a fixed period of time (Childers & Tomasello, 2002), the type of word to be learned (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) (Oetting et al, 1995;, and the phonotactic probability of the new word (Storkel, 2001;Storkel, 2003;Vitevitch, Luce, Charles-Luce, & Kemmerer, 1997;Vitevitch, Luce, Pisoni, & Auer, 1999).…”

Measuring the effects of spectral smearing and enhancement on speech recognition in noise for adults and children

“…Thus, the ability to recover this time-varying spectral structure is critical to the processes involved in language acquisition, such as early word learning. In turn, that idea means that the effects of broadened auditory filters associated with hearing loss could be predicted to disrupt early word learning especially strongly, and support for that prediction comes from studies showing difficulties specifically in word learning among children with mild-to-moderate hearing loss, compared to children with normal hearing (e.g., Gilbertson and Kamhi, 1995;Stelmachowicz et al, 2004). Again, however, outcomes in those studies for children with hearing loss did not vary with degree of threshold shift, raising the possibility that the extent of broadening of auditory filters may have an effect on language acquisition somewhat independently of auditory thresholds.…”