Abstract
AbstractThe present study is the first to investigate morphosyntactic development in congenitally profound hearing-impaired children without additional disabilities who received an auditory brainstem implant (ABI) in Flanders (Belgium). Auditory brainstem implantation (ABI) is a relatively recent development in paediatric hearing restoration. Very early implanted children’s spontaneous language production has hardly been studied and reported on in the international literature. Our study is the first longitudinal investigation of ABI children’s syntagmatic (syntactic) development, as indexed by mean length of utterance (MLU); and their paradigmatic (morphological) development, as measured by mean size of paradigm (MSP). The development of children with ABI is compared to that of children with cochlear implants (CI) and children with typical hearing (NH). These groups were matched to the ABI group in two ways: based on their chronological age, and based on their hearing age (i.e., the length of their hearing experience). The grammatical development of three-to-six-year-old children with ABI is considerably lagging behind their age-matched peers with CI and NH. But group differences decreased when the children were matched on hearing age instead of chronological age. However, the differences were still significant: children with ABI produce significantly shorter sentences (MLU) and fewer different verb forms per lemma (MSP). In addition, considerable variation was found between the children with ABI, but even the best performing child with ABI was not able to close the gap with hearing age-matched peers with CI and NH. To conclude, our results show that grammatical development is fairly limited in children with ABI, even in a group of children with ABI with a very advantageous profile in the ABI population.KeywordsAuditory brainstem implantationMorphosyntactic developmentLexical developmentLanguage
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