The relationship between reasoning and language ability: comparing children with cochlear implants and children with typical hearing

Abstract

Purpose: Language has been suggested to play a facilitating role for analogical reasoning tasks, especially for those with high complexity. This study aims to evaluate if differences in analogical reasoning ability between children with cochlear implants (CI) and children with typical hearing (TH) might be explained by differences in language ability. Methods: The analogical reasoning ability (verbal; non-verbal; complex non-verbal: high relational integration demand) of children with CI (N = 15, mean age = 6;7) was compared to two groups of children with TH: age and language matched (TH-A+L, N ¼ 23, mean age = 6;5), and age matched (TH-A, N = 23, mean age = 6;5). Results: Children with CI were found to perform comparable to Group TH-A+L on non-verbal reasoning tasks but significantly more poorly on a verbal analogical reasoning task. Children with CI were found to perform significantly more poorly on both the non-verbal analogical reasoning task with high relational integration demand and on the verbal analogical reasoning task compared to Group TH-A. For the non-verbal analogical reasoning task with lower relational integration demand only a tendency for a difference between group CI and Group TH-A was found. Conclusions: The results suggest that verbal strategies are influencing the performance on the nonverbal analogical reasoning tasks with a higher relational integration demand. The possible reasons for this are discussed. The verbal analogical reasoning task used in the current study partly measured lexical access. Differences between the children with CI and both groups of children with TH might therefore be explained by differences in expressive vocabulary skills.

Preschoolers’ Perceptual Analogical Reasoning and Map Reading: A Preliminary Study on the Mediating Effect of Spatial Language

“…Similarly, preschool children who had learned the term “middle” performed better on a midpoint search task than those who had not [ 62 ]. However, research has demonstrated that locative terms and spatial grammar have a central role in navigation ability in individuals with different diseases (i.e., Williams Syndrome and deafness), suggesting that difficulties in spatial language may constrain the development of spatial abilities, including geometrical or landmark information processing [ 16 , 63 , 64 ]. These findings align with Shusterman and colleagues [ 65 ], who argued that spatial expressions allow for semantically combining and coding spatial information about the environment with visual information (e.g., left of the coloured wall), facilitating map reading.…”

“…Classical research suggests that using spatial competencies, such as map reading, is a more basic ability than analogical reasoning [ 14 , 15 ]. The latter represents a core element of human cognition, which involves recognizing and comparing different objects, events, or situations, as well as determining what they have in common [ 16 ]. This type of reasoning represents a critical factor of children’s higher-order cognitive system, enabling them to make inferences about novel phenomena, transfer learning across contexts, and extract relevant information from everyday experiences through relational similarities [ 17 ].…”

Longitudinal Development of Verbal and Nonverbal Intelligence After Cochlear Implantation According to Wechsler Tests in German-speaking Children: A Preliminary Study

“…These differences could potentially also be due to neuropsychological functional deficits which may affect speech both in children with normal hearing and those who are hard of hearing (Kühn, in press). In addition, these results could also be interpreted as potential further support for the notion of a relative interdependence of children’s verbal and nonverbal abilities (Remine et al 2007; Socher, Ingebrand et al 2020). However, it ultimately remains unclear at this point whether increased verbal knowledge supports nonverbal skills (e.g., through the recruitment of inner speech when solving nonverbal tasks) and/or nonverbal skills form the basis to compensate for previous linguistic deficits.…”

Talking About the Absent and the Abstract: Referential Communication in Language and Gesture

“…Some correlational evidence is consistent with this possibility. First, language skills in infancy and early childhood predict a range of abstract reasoning skills in later childhood (Hammer et al, 2017;LeFevre et al, 2010LeFevre et al, , 2010Marchman & Fernald, 2008;Morgan et al, 2015;Peng et al, 2020;Slot et al, 2020;Socher et al, 2020). Second, children deprived of language input early in life, such as deaf children of hearing parents who lack access to sign language, have more difficult in abstract reasoning tasks than their hearing peers (Socher, 2020).…”