Comparison of Pragmatic Skills in Hearing Aid Users’ Vs Normal Hearing Children

Abstract

The most typical birth defect is hearing impairment. Hearing impairment has a negative impact on the development of early communication skills. Objectives: To compare the pragmatic abilities of both children who are hearing aid users and normal hearing to asses pragmatics based on instrumental, regulatory, personal, interactional, need explanations, knowledge sharing and explanation. Methods: It was a comparative cross-sectional survey. Total sample of 54 children were included. 27 children were hearing aid users and 27 with the normal hearing. Purposive sampling technique was used in this study. All individuals with normal hearing and those who use hearing aid were included with the age range of 3 to 7 years. Social communication pragmatics checklist was used for collecting the data. Results: Results showed that children with normal hearing had overall better pragmatic abilities as contrast to the children who use hearing aid. Independent sample t test was using for analysis of data and p-value was less than 0.05. Conclusions: It was concluded that communication-pragmatic abilities are good in children with normal hearing as compared to children who are hearing aid users.