Abstract
Background: Among implanted children with similar duration of auditory deprivation and clinical history, the morpho-syntactic skills remain highly variable, suggesting that other fundamental factors may determine the linguistic outcomes of these children, beyond their auditory recovery. The present study analyzed the morpho-syntactic discrepancies among three children with cochlear implant (CI), with the aim of understanding if morpho-syntactic deficits may be characterized as a domain-specific language disorder. Method: The three children (mean age = 7.2; SD = 0.4) received their CI at 2.7, 3.7, and 5.9 years of age. Their morpho-syntactic skills were evaluated in both comprehension and production and compared with 15 age-matched normal-hearing children (mean age = 6.6; SD = 0.3). Results: Cases 1 and 2 displayed a marked impairment across morphology and syntax, whereas Case 3, the late-implanted child, showed a morpho-syntactic profile well within the normal boundaries. A qualitative analysis showed, in Cases 1 and 2, language deficits similar to those of normal hearing children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Conclusions: We suggest that a severe grammatical deficit may be, in some implanted children, the final outcome of a concomitant impairment to the language system. Clinical implications for assessment and intervention are discussed.
Highlights
In industrialized countries, the vast majority of children with neurosensorial severe to profound deafness can receive one or two cochlear implants (CIs) that can allow them to be exposed to spoken language in natural contexts, offering the opportunity for incidental language learning [1]
As the main research question, we wondered if the reported delay in language acquisition among implanted children may be characterized as a domain-specific language disorder
The results indicated that mastery of grammatical comprehension was unevenly distributed across the three deaf children; Case 1 and Case 2 displayed a marked impairment across morphology and syntax, whereas Case 3 showed a morpho-syntactic profile well within the normal boundaries
Summary
The vast majority of children with neurosensorial severe to profound deafness can receive one or two cochlear implants (CIs) that can allow them to be exposed to spoken language in natural contexts, offering the opportunity for incidental language learning [1]. The age of implantation is credited to play a crucial role in the language acquisition of the implanted deaf children; intuitively, by making CI available at an early age, one would expect the gap between language development and chronological age to be minimized. A study on Italian preschool children [3] revealed a highly significant effect of age at CI surgery on productive vocabulary, mean length of utterance (MLU), and sentence complexity, with preschool females implanted under 1 year showing better performance.
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