The relation between short-term memory and vocabulary skills in Greek children with cochlear implants: The role of hearing experience

Abstract

Weak performance in short-term memory (STM) in children with cochlear implants (CI) may have an impact on vocabulary development. Vocabulary, phonological STM (nonword repetition), phonological/verbal STM (digit span) and rapid naming measures were administered to 15 Greek-speaking children with CI (ages 4;6-8;6) and to chronological age (CA) and younger controls with normal hearing (NH). The children with CI exhibited lower performance in all tasks compared to CA controls but lagged behind only in phonological STM tasks in comparison to younger NH controls. For children with CI, vocabulary correlated with phonological STM, while for younger NH controls it correlated with all the cognitive measures used. The present results showed that children with CI demonstrate age-matched rapid naming skills, a slower development in vocabulary acquisition rates and developmental lags in their phonological STM skills, suggesting an overall atypical pattern of development. The results also suggest a relationship between these skills which needs to be explored further.

Verbal working memory resources and comprehension of relative clauses in children with cochlear implants

“…Some studies (e.g. Briscoe et al, 2001; Dillon et al, 2004; Talli et al, 2018) found that English and Greek DHH children had impaired PSTM. Different results were obtained for Italian (Guasti et al, 2014).…”

“…Briscoe et al (2001) suggested that the lower performance of DHH children in NWR (but not in the FDS task) is not due to a compromised memory capacity, but to the computational overload required to process novel sound sequences through a deficient auditory system. Other studies suggested that poor performance and low scores in these measures may depend on the quality of received input, which is partial and degraded, and does not favour appropriate phonological representation of spoken language in short-term memory (Nittrouer et al, 2013; Pisoni et al, 2011; Talli et al, 2018).…”

“…Much research has investigated the role that NWR and digit span play in the development of linguistic skills in DHH individuals (Briscoe et al, 2001; Dillon et al, 2004; Guasti et al, 2014; Harris et al, 2013; Penke & Wimmer, 2018; Pisoni & Geers, 2000; Talli et al, 2018). In children with CIs, NWR was found to correlate with spoken word recognition, language comprehension, speech intelligibility, speech rate (Dillon et al, 2004) and receptive vocabulary (Talli et al, 2018). Digit span was found to predict speech intelligibility, speech perception, language comprehension and reading (Pisoni & Geers, 2000).…”

“…In addition to difficulties with grammar, children with CIs also show low scores on memory measures, such as nonword repetition (NWR) (testing phonological short-term memory [STM]) and/or digit span tasks (testing phonological/verbal STM and working memory [WM]) (Casserly & Pisoni, 2013; Conway et al, 2009; Dillon & Pisoni, 2006; Penke & Wimmer, 2018; Talli et al, 2018). Difficulties with memory tasks are claimed to be due to the presence of degraded input that affects short-term memory storage (Nittrouer et al, 2013; Talli et al, 2018). Limited memory resources also have an impact on developing grammar skills in children with CIs (Dillon et al, 2004; Harris et al, 2013; Penke & Wimmer, 2018; Pisoni & Geers, 2000; Talli et al, 2018; Volpato & Adani, 2009).…”

“…Difficulties with memory tasks are claimed to be due to the presence of degraded input that affects short-term memory storage (Nittrouer et al, 2013; Talli et al, 2018). Limited memory resources also have an impact on developing grammar skills in children with CIs (Dillon et al, 2004; Harris et al, 2013; Penke & Wimmer, 2018; Pisoni & Geers, 2000; Talli et al, 2018; Volpato & Adani, 2009). Interestingly, NWR is a marker of developmental language disorder (DLD) and is a predictor of grammatical weaknesses in language impaired children (e.g.…”