Phonological Awareness Skills in Children With Early and Late Cochlear Implantation: Effects of Task and Phonological Unit

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (9) ◽  
pp. 2930-2939
Author(s):  
Youngmee Lee

Purpose Phonological awareness (PA) skills are critical for spoken language acquisition and literacy. PA manifests in various skills that can be identified based on task performance and speech sound unit size. This study compared the PA skills of children with early cochlear implantation (E-CI), children with late cochlear implantation (L-CI), and children with typical hearing (TH) in relation to task and phonological unit. It also attempted to identify the significant predictors of PA skills in each CI and TH group. Method Twenty children with E-CI, 20 children with L-CI, and 20 children with TH participated in this study. PA skills were assessed using elision, blending, and segmenting tasks at both the syllabic and phonemic levels. Results The E-CI and L-CI groups performed significantly less well than the TH group on the elision and blending tasks at the syllabic level. However, the E-CI group performed at a similar level as the TH group in the segmenting tasks at both the syllabic and phonemic levels. The regression analysis identified age at implantation and receptive vocabulary scores as significant predictors of PA skills in children with CIs. Conclusions Although all the children with CIs had age-appropriate receptive vocabulary skills, the PA skills of both the E-CI and L-CI groups tended to lag behind those of the TH group in the elision and blending tasks at the syllabic level. Age at implantation and receptive vocabulary skills affected the development of PA skills in children with CIs.

2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Rvachew ◽  
Alyssa Ohberg ◽  
Meghann Grawburg ◽  
Joan Heyding

The purpose of this study was to compare the phonological awareness abilities of 2 groups of 4-year-old children: one with normally developing speech and language skills and the other with moderately or severely delayed expressive phonological skills but age-appropriate receptive vocabulary skills. Each group received tests of articulation, receptive vocabulary, phonemic perception, early literacy, and phonological awareness skills. The groups were matched for receptive language skills, age, socioeconomic status, and emergent literacy knowledge. The children with expressive phonological delays demonstrated significantly poorer phonemic perception and phonological awareness skills than their normally developing peers. The results suggest that preschool children with delayed expressive phonological abilities should be screened for their phonological awareness skills even when their language skills are otherwise normally developing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (5) ◽  
pp. 1340-1351
Author(s):  
Françoise Brosseau-Lapré ◽  
Wan Hee Kim

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the ability of preschoolers with speech sound disorder (SSD) and with typical speech and language development (TD) to understand foreign-accented words, providing a window into the quality of their underlying phonological representations. We also investigated the relationship between vocabulary skills and the ability to identify words that are frequent and have few neighbors (lexically easy words) and words that are less frequent and have many neighbors (lexically hard words). Method Thirty-two monolingual English-speaking children (16 with SSD, 16 with TD), ages 4 and 5 years, completed standardized speech and language tests and a two-alternative forced-choice word identification task of English words produced by a native English speaker and a native Korean speaker. Results Children with SSD had more difficulty identifying words produced by both talkers than children with TD and showed a larger difficulty identifying Korean-accented words. Both groups of children identified lexically easy words more accurately than lexically hard words, although this difference was not significant when including receptive vocabulary skills in the analysis. Identification of lexically hard words, both those produced by the native English speaker and the nonnative English speaker, increased with vocabulary size. Conclusion Considering the performance of the children with SSD under ideal listening conditions in this study, we can assume that, as a group, children with SSD may experience greater difficulty identifying foreign-accented words in environments with background noise.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (7) ◽  
pp. 1893-1893
Author(s):  
Elinor Saiegh-Haddad ◽  
Abeer Shahbari-Kassem ◽  
Rachel Schif

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 643-655 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann E. Geers ◽  
Johanna G. Nicholas

Purpose In this article, the authors sought to determine whether the precise age of implantation (AOI) remains an important predictor of spoken language outcomes in later childhood for those who received a cochlear implant (CI) between 12 and 38 months of age. Relative advantages of receiving a bilateral CI after age 4.5 years, better pre-CI-aided hearing, and longer CI experience were also examined. Method Sixty children participated in a prospective longitudinal study of outcomes at 4.5 and 10.5 years of age. Twenty-nine children received a sequential second CI. Test scores were compared with normative samples of hearing age mates, and predictors of outcomes were identified. Results Standard scores on language tests at 10.5 years of age remained significantly correlated with age of first cochlear implantation. Scores were not associated with receipt of a second, sequentially acquired CI. Significantly higher scores were achieved for vocabulary as compared with overall language, a finding not evident when the children were tested at younger ages. Conclusion Age-appropriate spoken language skills continued to be more likely with younger AOI, even after an average of 8.6 years of additional CI use. Receipt of a second implant between ages 4 and 10 years and longer duration of device use did not provide significant added benefit.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 1649-1674
Author(s):  
Elinor Saiegh-Haddad ◽  
Abeer Shahbari-Kassem ◽  
Rachel Schiff

1998 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margie Gilbertson ◽  
Ronald K. Bramlett

The purpose of this study was to investigate informal phonological awareness measures as predictors of first-grade broad reading ability. Subjects were 91 former Head Start students who were administered standardized assessments of cognitive ability and receptive vocabulary, and informal phonological awareness measures during kindergarten and early first grade. Regression analyses indicated that three phonological awareness tasks, Invented Spelling, Categorization, and Blending, were the most predictive of standardized reading measures obtained at the end of first grade. Discriminant analyses indicated that these three phonological awareness tasks correctly identified at-risk students with 92% accuracy. Clinical use of a cutoff score for these measures is suggested, along with general intervention guidelines for practicing clinicians.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 603-616
Author(s):  
Kenn Apel ◽  
Victoria S. Henbest

Purpose Morphological awareness is the ability to consciously manipulate the smallest units of meaning in language. Morphological awareness contributes to success with literacy skills for children with typical language and those with language impairment. However, little research has focused on the morphological awareness skills of children with speech sound disorders (SSD), who may be at risk for literacy impairments. No researcher has examined the morphological awareness skills of children with SSD and compared their skills to children with typical speech using tasks representing a comprehensive definition of morphological awareness, which was the main purpose of this study. Method Thirty second- and third-grade students with SSD and 30 with typical speech skills, matched on age and receptive vocabulary, completed four morphological awareness tasks and measures of receptive vocabulary, real-word reading, pseudoword reading, and word-level spelling. Results Results indicated there was no difference between the morphological awareness skills of students with and without SSD. Although morphological awareness was moderately to strongly related to the students' literacy skills, performance on the morphological awareness tasks contributed little to no additional variance to the children's real-word reading and spelling skills beyond what was accounted for by pseudoword reading. Conclusions Findings suggest that early elementary-age students with SSD may not present with concomitant morphological awareness difficulties and that the morphological awareness skills of these students may not play a unique role in their word-level literacy skills. Limitations and suggestions for future research on the morphological awareness skills of children with SSD are discussed.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Farquharson

Speech sound disorders are a complex and often persistent disorder in young children. For many children, therapy results in successful remediation of the errored productions as well as age-appropriate literacy and academic progress. However, for some children, while they may attain age-appropriate speech production skills, they later have academic difficulties. For SLPs in the public schools, these children present as challenging in terms of both continuing treatment as well as in terms of caseload management. What happens after dismissal? Have these children truly acquired adequate speech production skills? Do they have lingering language, literacy, and cognitive deficits? The purpose of this article is to describe the language, literacy, and cognitive features of a small group of children with remediated speech sound disorders compared to their typically developing peers.


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