Spoken and Written Narrative in Persian-Speaking Students Who Received Cochlear Implant and/or Hearing Aid

Abstract

Objectives To compare narrative skills between fourth and fifth grades of Persian-speaking students with hearing impairments and typical hearing students of the same grade and also to evaluate the effects of group, sex, hearing age, and educational grade of the students on their spoken/written narrative performance.Methods The subjects were 174 students aged 10–13 years, 54 of whom wore cochlear implants, 60 suffered from moderate to severe hearing losses and wore hearing aids, with the remaining 60 students being typical hearing in terms of the sense of hearing. The micro- and macrostructure components of spoken and written narrative were elicited from a pictorial story (The Playful Little Elephant) and then scored by raters.Results Compared to the typical hearing, the students with hearing impairments had significantly lower scores in all of the microstructure components of narratives. However, the findings showed no significant difference among different groups in macrostructure components of narratives. It was also revealed that the students had equal performance in spoken and written narrative. Finally, factor analysis manifested that group, sex, hearing age, and educational level of children might alter the outcome measures in various interactions.Conclusion Although cochlear implantation was more effective than hearing aid on spoken and written narrative skills, the Persian-speaking students with hearing impairments were seen to need additional trainings on microstructure components of spoken/written narrative.

Effect of cochlear implantation on language development and assessment of the quality of studies in this field: A systematic review

“…Another four articles concentrated on grammatical skills (understanding and expressing passive verbs and MLU (mean length of utterance) indices, morpho-syntactic abilities and sentence comprehension) as well as some semantic skills (NDW (number of different words)/NTW (number of total words) indices and TTR (Type-Token Ratio)) (31,36,40,42). One article reviewed spoken and written narrative abilities (41) and two studies check out reading skills (33,39).…”

“…Both studies showed that the reading skills of nonwords in CI children with NH children were not significantly different (33,39). A study that examined the narrative skills of these children announced that CIs had significantly lower scores in all of the microstructure components of narratives, but no significant difference was found in macrostructure components of narratives between CIs and normal children (41).One of these studies represented that although word and non-word reading and word comprehension skills are similar in children with CI and hearing aid, text comprehension is better in CI children (39).…”