Semantic fluency in deaf children who use spoken and signed language in comparison with hearing peers

Abstract

BackgroundDeafness has an adverse impact on children's ability to acquire spoken languages. Signed languages offer a more accessible input for deaf children, but because the vast majority are born to hearing parents who do not sign, their early exposure to sign language is limited. Deaf children as a whole are therefore at high risk of language delays.AimsWe compared deaf and hearing children's performance on a semantic fluency task. Optimal performance on this task requires a systematic search of the mental lexicon, the retrieval of words within a subcategory and, when that subcategory is exhausted, switching to a new subcategory. We compared retrieval patterns between groups, and also compared the responses of deaf children who used British Sign Language (BSL) with those who used spoken English. We investigated how semantic fluency performance related to children's expressive vocabulary and executive function skills, and also retested semantic fluency in the majority of the children nearly 2 years later, in order to investigate how much progress they had made in that time.Methods & ProceduresParticipants were deaf children aged 6–11 years (N = 106, comprising 69 users of spoken English, 29 users of BSL and eight users of Sign Supported English—SSE) compared with hearing children (N = 120) of the same age who used spoken English. Semantic fluency was tested for the category ‘animals’. We coded for errors, clusters (e.g., ‘pets’, ‘farm animals’) and switches. Participants also completed the Expressive One‐Word Picture Vocabulary Test and a battery of six non‐verbal executive function tasks. In addition, we collected follow‐up semantic fluency data for 70 deaf and 74 hearing children, nearly 2 years after they were first tested.Outcomes & ResultsDeaf children, whether using spoken or signed language, produced fewer items in the semantic fluency task than hearing children, but they showed similar patterns of responses for items most commonly produced, clustering of items into subcategories and switching between subcategories. Both vocabulary and executive function scores predicted the number of correct items produced. Follow‐up data from deaf participants showed continuing delays relative to hearing children 2 years later.Conclusions & ImplicationsWe conclude that semantic fluency can be used experimentally to investigate lexical organization in deaf children, and that it potentially has clinical utility across the heterogeneous deaf population. We present normative data to aid clinicians who wish to use this task with deaf children.

Semantic fluency difficulties in developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder (DLD): poor semantic structure of the lexicon or slower retrieval processes?

“…This process is referred to as switching. Thus, response patterns in semantic fluency tasks reflect lexical organization and lexical retrieval processes (e.g., Marshall et al 2018).…”

Sign effects in spoken word learning by oral deaf and hard-of-hearing children, and by hearing children

“…As reported by Gershkoff-Stowe and Hahn (2007), children with smaller vocabularies perform poorer on word learning tasks, and DHH children often have lower vocabulary than their hearing peers (e.g. Blamey, 2003;Coppens et al, 2012;Marshall et al, 2018). Connecting such measurements to results of a spoken word learning task with manual stimuli would be interesting to include in future research.…”

“…For children to acquire the words of a spoken language, however, auditory access is vital. Children who are deaf/hard-of-hearing (DHH) have limited access to spoken language even when they use hearing aids (HAs) and/or cochlear implants (CIs), and this limited access may impede their spoken vocabulary development (Blamey, 2003; Marshall et al, 2018). Indeed, upon entering primary school, many DHH children have smaller vocabularies in their spoken language than their hearing peers (Coppens et al, 2012; Hayes et al, 2009), and some never catch up (Convertino et al, 2014; Sarchet et al, 2014).…”

Strengths‐based reading assessment for deaf and hard‐of‐hearing students

“…This has important implications for d/Dhh readers in constructing a more thorough understanding of their skills and needs. The widespread difficulties that many d/Dhh individuals have with English fluency (Anderson, ; Blamey & Sarant, ; Marshall et al, ; Sarant, Holt, Dowell, Rickards, & Blamey, ) suggest some potential parallels with readers who are English Language Learners. Research on dialect and bilingual strategies across diverse hearing populations has demonstrated that readers’ miscues are schema‐driven to include culture and dialect.…”