Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation of Linguistic Input Support to a Prelingually Deaf Child With Cued Speech: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper studies the linguistic input attended by a deaf child exposed to cued speech (CS) in the final part of her prelinguistic period (18-24 months). Subjects are the child, her mother, and her therapist. Analyses have provided data about the quantity of input directed to the child (oral input, more than 1,000 words per half-an-hour session; cued ratio, more than 60% of oral input; and attended ratio, more than 55% of oral input), its linguistic quality (lexical variety, grammatical complexity, etc.), and other properties of interaction (child attention and use of spontaneous gestures). Results show that both adults provided a rich linguistic input to the child and that the child attended most of the input that the adults cued. These results might explain the positive linguistic development of children exposed early to CS.

What can be expected from a late cochlear implantation?

“…In addition, even though they might wear hearing aids they do not develop a ''listening attitude''. It is difficult to convert from a visual (and spatial) to an auditory (and temporal) communication system [25][26][27]. However, this is not impossible, as we report here one of such exceptional cases, a former exclusive sign language user, who became able to convert to the oral mode only.…”

Teaching language components to deaf/hard-of-hearing and cochlear implant users: a literature review

“…Seven studies had more than 21 participants 13,[29][30][31][32][33][34] , in which three publications 29,31,33 had hearing participants as direct target of the interventions (e.g., parents, teachers and CI users caretakers) aiming to evaluate its indirect effects on deaf children and CI users' rehabilitation. Two studies were characterized as case studies and only one individual participated of each 35,36 .…”

“…Table 1 shows the description of the participants, as well as the difficulties to identify the participant's diagnostics. Most of the studies (13 publications) among those that provided directly or indirectly information about when the hearing loss occurred (some studies provide only the child's age at the time of diagnosis or at the time of implantation) -if pre-lingual or post-lingual -had pre-lingual deaf children as participants 13,14,[16][17][18][19][20][21]24,26,30,35,36 . Only one study explicitly reported the participation of post-lingual deaf individuals 26 .…”

“…Only one study explicitly reported the participation of post-lingual deaf individuals 26 . Hearing individuals participated in interventions reported by seven studies [27][28][29][31][32][33]36 . Some of these studies, such as the publications from Suskind et al 33 and Clare Allen et al 31 aimed to establish teaching repertoires or increase the number of words and the quality of statements emitted in the context of the deaf and CI user child -thus, creating conditions for the occurrence of incidental learning of these repertoires.…”

“…This and other studies 20,21 discuss the relation between speech production and reading. Other publications aiming for speech production reported different approaches, such as the Cued Speech, adopted by Torres, Moreno-Torres e Santana 36 . Similar to the study conducted by Smith and Wang…”