Phonologic awareness impacts receptive vocabulary in kids with CIs

By medwireNews Reporters

Children with cochlear implants (CIs) experience developmental delays in phonologic awareness (PA) and nonword repetition (NWR), research shows.

In addition, there was a trend toward slower naming speed on rapid automated naming (RAN) tasks among children with CIs compared with children who had normal hearing.

"Children with CIs showed lower levels of distinguishing and manipulating syllables or phonemes, and they tended to display shorter working memory for coding, retaining, and producing a string of heard phonemes," report researcher Dongun Yim (Ewha Woman's University, Seoul, Korea) and colleagues.

Published in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, the study included 25 children with normal hearing who served as controls and 25 deaf children who received a CI before two years of age.

Phonologic processing skills were measured by PA, NWR, and RAN tasks and receptive vocabulary skills were also tested using Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (Korean version).

The mean scores of the PA task were 33.1% for the CI group and 44.0% for the normal-hearing children.

For the NWR task, the mean scores of the CI and normal-hearing children were 60.0% and 78.6%, respectively. For the naming speed on the RAN tasks, the CI children required 214 seconds, on average, while the time required by the normal-hearing children was 213 seconds.

In an assessment of the between-group differences, ANCOVA analyses revealed that CI scores were lower than those achieved by normal-hearing children for all the phonologic tasks. While the differences were significant for PA and NWR tasks, the difference was not statistically significant for RAN scores.

Overall, the receptive vocabulary test scores were significantly correlated with chronologic age, duration of implant use, and PA, NWR, and RAN scores.

Among the children with CIs, chronologic age, age at implantation, duration of implant use, and PA, NWR, and RAN scores were all associated with receptive vocabulary skills.

However, the only significant predictor of receptive vocabulary skills was the PA score, accounting for 54.0% of the variance in receptive vocabulary scores for children with CIs.

"Based on these results, we suggest that children with better PA skills have higher receptive vocabulary skills after implantation," explain the researchers.

For children with normal hearing, age was the only predictor of receptive vocabulary in children with normal hearing, accounting for 77% of the variance in scores.

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