scholarly journals Literacy Outcomes for Primary School Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing: A Cohort Comparison Study

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 701-711 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Harris ◽  
Emmanouela Terlektsi ◽  
Fiona E. Kyle

Purpose In this study, we compared the language and literacy of two cohorts of children with severe–profound hearing loss, recruited 10 years apart, to determine if outcomes had improved in line with the introduction of newborn hearing screening and access to improved hearing aid technology. Method Forty-two children with deafness, aged 5–7 years with a mean unaided loss of 102 DB, were assessed on language, reading, and phonological skills. Their performance was compared with that of a similar group of 32 children with deafness assessed 10 years earlier and also a group of 40 children with normal hearing of similar single word reading ability. Results English vocabulary was significantly higher in the new cohort although it was still below chronological age. Phonological awareness and reading ability had not significantly changed over time. In both cohorts, English vocabulary predicted reading, but phonological awareness was only a significant predictor for the new cohort. Conclusions The current results show that vocabulary knowledge of children with severe–profound hearing loss has improved over time, but there has not been a commensurate improvement in phonological skills or reading. They suggest that children with severe–profound hearing loss will require continued support to develop robust phonological coding skills to underpin reading.

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-123
Author(s):  
Alejandro Cuza ◽  
Lauren Miller ◽  
Adrian Pasquarella ◽  
Xi Chen

The present study examines the role of instruction in the development of reading and writing skills in Spanish as a heritage language during childhood. Sixty-six (n=66) Spanish heritage speakers in K-4th grade participated in an 18-week Spanish intervention. The curriculum included the development of phonological awareness, reading fluency and accuracy as well as vocabulary via cognate instruction. Undergraduate students majoring in Spanish conducted the intervention as part of a service-learning program. Standardized measures given to the students before and after the intervention included phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary knowledge, word reading accuracy, and word reading fluency. The treatment group was compared to a group of twenty-five children (n=25) who did not participate in the program. The two groups were matched by age and non-verbal reasoning. Results from pre and post-tests showed significant gains for the treatment group in vocabulary growth, word reading fluency and word reading accuracy. Phonological awareness developed significantly for both groups, but there was no advantage for the experimental group. Overall, the intervention was effective at promoting both Spanish language and literacy skills (Rhoades, 2009). Contextualized and explicit instruction on word reading and decoding, as well as oral language and vocabulary knowledge in Spanish, helped Spanish heritage learners develop academic language and literacy skills in their first/minority language. Furthermore, the results provide strong evidence supporting the efficacy of a service-learning program aimed at facilitating the development of literacy skills among child heritage language learners.


Author(s):  
Joanna H. Lowenstein ◽  
Susan Nittrouer

Purpose Better auditory prostheses and earlier interventions have led to remarkable improvements in spoken language abilities for children with hearing loss (HL), but these children often still struggle academically. This study tested a hypothesis for why this may be, proposing that the language of school becomes increasingly disconnected from everyday discourse, requiring greater reliance on bottom-up phonological structure, and children with HL have difficulty recovering that structure from the speech signal. Participants One hundred nineteen fourth graders participated: 48 with normal hearing (NH), 19 with moderate losses who used hearing aids (HAs), and 52 with severe-to-profound losses who used cochlear implants (CIs). Method Three analyses were conducted. #1: Sentences with malapropisms were created, and children's abilities to recognize them were assessed. #2: Factors contributing to those abilities were evaluated, including phonological awareness, phonological processing, vocabulary, verbal working memory, and oral narratives. #3: Teachers' ratings of students' academic competence were obtained, and factors accounting for those ratings were evaluated, including the five listed above, along with word reading and reading comprehension. Results #1: Children with HAs and CIs performed more poorly on malapropism recognition than children with NH, but similarly to each other. #2: All children with HL demonstrated large phonological deficits, but they were especially large for children with CIs. Phonological awareness explained the most variance in malapropism recognition for children with CIs. Vocabulary knowledge explained malapropism recognition for children with NH or HAs, but other factors also contributed. #3: Teachers rated academic competence for children with CIs more poorly than for children with NH or HAs, and variance in those ratings for children with CIs were primarily explained by malapropism scores. Conclusion Children with HL have difficulty recognizing acoustic–phonetic detail in the speech signal, and that constrains their abilities to follow conversations in academic settings, especially if HL is severe enough to require CIs. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13133018


2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 1187-1203 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. F. Halliday ◽  
D. V. M. Bishop

It has been suggested that specific reading disability (SRD) may be attributable to an impaired ability to perceive spectral differences between sounds that leads to a deficit in frequency discrimination and subsequent problems with language and literacy. The objective of the present study was threefold. We aimed to (a) determine whether children with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss were impaired in their ability to discriminate frequency, (b) assess the extent to which any such deficits may be due to an inability to use information derived from phase locking, and (c) examine whether frequency discrimination abilities were predictive of measures of word and nonword reading and nonword repetition. Difference limens for frequency (DLFs) were obtained for 22 children with mild to moderate hearing loss (SNH group) and 22 age-matched controls (CA group) at central frequencies of 1 kHz, where phase-locking information is available, and 6 kHz, where it is not. A battery of standardized tests of language and literacy was also administered. The SNH group exhibited significantly elevated DLFs at both 1 and 6 kHz relative to controls, despite considerable variability of thresholds in both groups. Although no group differences were found for receptive and expressive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and nonword reading, the SNH group performed worse than controls on word reading and nonword repetition, even though word reading acores were age-appropriate. Frequency discrimination abilities were associated with reading and nonword repetition across groups, but these correlations largely disappeared when the two groups were analyzed separately. Together, these results provide evidence for a dissociation between impaired frequency discrimination and relatively "spared" language and literacy in children with mild to moderate sensorineural hearing loss. These results cast doubt on the assertion that a deficit in frequency discrimination necessarily leads to marked deficits in the development of language and literacy.


2001 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Blamey ◽  
Julia Z. Sarant ◽  
Louise E. Paatsch ◽  
Johanna G. Barry ◽  
Catherine P. Bow ◽  
...  

Eighty-seven primary-school children with impaired hearing were evaluated using speech perception, production, and language measures over a 3-year period. Forty-seven children with a mean unaided pure-tone-average hearing loss of 106 dB HL used a 22-electrode cochlear implant, and 40 with a mean unaided puretone-average hearing loss of 78 dB HL were fitted with hearing aids. All children were enrolled in oral/aural habilitation programs, and most attended integrated classes with normally hearing children for part of the time at school. Multiple linear regression was used to describe the relationships among the speech perception, production, and language measures, and the trends over time. Little difference in the level of performance and trends was found for the two groups of children, so the perceptual effect of the implant is equivalent, on average, to an improvement of about 28 dB in hearing thresholds. Scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals showed an upward trend at about 60% of the rate for normally hearing children. Rates of improvement for individual children were not correlated significantly with degree of hearing loss. The children showed a wide scatter about the average speech production score of 40% of words correctly produced in spontaneous conversations, with no significant upward trend with age. Scores on the open-set Consonant-Nucleus-Consonant (CNC) monosyllabic word test and the Bench-Kowal-Bamford (BKB) sentence test were strongly related to language level (as measured by an equivalent age on the PPVT) and speech production scores for both auditory-visual and auditory test conditions. After allowing for differences in language, speech perception scores in the auditory test condition showed a slight downward trend over time, which is consistent with the known biological effects of hearing loss on the auditory periphery and brainstem. Speech perception scores in the auditory condition also decreased significantly by about 5% for every 10 dB of hearing loss in the hearing aid group. The regression analysis model allows separation of the effects of language, speech production, and hearing levels on speech perception scores so that the effects of habilitation and training in these areas can be observed and/or predicted. The model suggests that most of the children in the study will reach a level of over 90% sentence recognition in the auditory-visual condition when their language becomes equivalent to that of a normally hearing 7-year-old, but they will enter secondary school at age 12 with an average language delay of about 4 or 5 years unless they receive concentrated and effective language training.


2005 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 559-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADÈLE LAFRANCE ◽  
ALEXANDRA GOTTARDO

French/English bilingual children (N=40) in French language schools participated in an 8-month longitudinal study of the relation between phonological processing skills and reading in French and English. Participants were administered measures of phonological awareness, working memory, naming speed, and reading in both languages. The results of the concurrent analyses show that phonological awareness skills in both French and English were uniquely predictive of reading performance in both languages after accounting for the influences of cognitive ability, reading ability, working memory, and naming speed. These findings support the hypothesis that phonological awareness is strongly related to beginning word reading skill in an alphabetic orthography. The results of the longitudinal analyses also suggest that orthographic depth influences phonological factors related to reading.


2001 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUDITH G. FOY ◽  
VIRGINIA MANN

Previous research has shown a clear relationship between phonological awareness and early reading ability. This article concerns some aspects of spoken language skill that may contribute to the development of phonological awareness, as manifested in rhyme awareness and phoneme awareness. It addresses the hypothesis that phonological awareness abilities are associated with measures that purportedly tap into the strength of phonological representations. We examined rhyme awareness, phoneme awareness, articulatory skill, speech perception, vocabulary, and letter and word knowledge in 40 children, aged 4 to 6, who were just beginning to be exposed to formal reading experiences in private preschools. The children also received cognitive tests and tests of reading ability. The results did not validate strength of phonological representation as a unitary construct underlying phonological awareness more generally, but instead revealed a selective pattern of associations between spoken language tasks and aspects of phonological awareness. Speech perception was closely associated with rhyme awareness measures when age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge were controlled. Children with a less developed sense of rhyme had a less mature pattern of articulation, independent of age, vocabulary, and letter knowledge. Phoneme awareness was associated with phonological perception and production. Children with low phoneme awareness skills showed a different pattern of speech perception and articulation errors than children with strong abilities. However, these differences appeared to be largely a function of age, letter knowledge, and especially vocabulary knowledge.


2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Walton

Kindergarten classrooms were randomly assigned to a songs group (n = 44) that used choral singing and movement to teach phonological skills, letter-sounds, and word reading, or to a control group (n = 49) where children received their regular language and literacy programs for equal amounts of time. The songs group teaching involved choral singing and movements created for the project to teach phonological skills, letter-sounds, and word reading. Children preferred songs that were quick to learn, had strong or soothing rhythms, and incorporated movements. Children in the songs group had increased letter-sounds, medial phoneme identity and word reading compared to children in the control group. Children in both groups made equal gains in rhyming and identifying phonemes in initial and final positions. Songs group children also read new words not presented in the songs program. Initial and medial phoneme identity and letter-sound knowledge made independent contributions to word reading.


Author(s):  
Sarmīte Tūbele ◽  
Egija Laganovska

This article contains theoretical analysis about how to develop phonological awareness in children 5–6 years of age and analysis of empirical findings. Elements of drama provide the great opportunity to improve phonological awareness.Reading and writing are the two most important techniques which pupils must achieve at school. Phonological awareness training has significant effects on overall reading ability, spelling, and reading comprehension. There are several well-established lines of argument for the importance of phonological skills to reading and spelling. Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in words. We know that children’s skills in phonological awareness is a good predictor of later reading success or difficulty. Some conclusions were drawn from theoretical and empirical findings. In this article, analysis of scientific and methodological literature is used as a method. Main findings –development of phonological awareness in children 5–6 years of age is possible and effective when using drama elements.


Author(s):  
Mohsen Saeidmanesh ◽  
Hasan Hajavi ◽  
Vahid Moradi

Background and Aim: Reading is not only a fundamental skill in learning but also an imp­ortant channel in dealing with the outside world. However, hearing impairment affects linguistic growth, including speaking and reading; deve­lopment of understanding; and academic achi­evement. The purpose of this study was to inv­estigate the effect of phonological awareness training on improving phonological reading and awareness in primary school children with hea­ring impairment. Methods: The present study has a quasi-experi­mental design. The research was conducted as pretest, intervention and posttest. A total of 20 children with moderate to severe hearing loss were enrolled in the experimental group and 20 subjects in another group as the control. Rea­ding and dyslexia test (NEMA) was used to ass­ess reading improvement and phonological awa­reness was assessed by the phonological aware­ness questionnaire. The data normality was che­cked by Kolmogorov-Smirnov test and non-parametric Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney U test were used to evaluate non-parametric data. Results: Based on the results, after teaching the phonological awareness strategies to the experi­mental group, their reading and phonological awareness scores increased significantly higher than the control group (p<0.05). Also the results show higher phonological awareness scores in girls. Conclusion: The results of this study showed that improvement of phonological awareness in children with hearing loss can improve and res­olve their reading performance and problems.


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