Phonological awareness and vocabulary performance of monolingual and bilingual preschool children with hearing loss

Abstract

This pilot study compared the phonological awareness skills and vocabulary performance of English monolingual and Spanish–English bilingual children with and without hearing loss. Preschool children with varying degrees of hearing loss ( n = 18) and preschool children without hearing loss ( n = 19) completed measures of phonological awareness and receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge. On phonological awareness tasks, the performance of bilingual children with hearing loss was significantly higher than bilingual children with normal hearing, but not higher than either monolingual group of children. On norm-referenced vocabulary knowledge measures, the performance of monolingual and bilingual children with hearing loss was significantly lower than monolingual and bilingual children with normal hearing. Correlations for phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge were found for both groups of children with normal hearing, but not children with hearing loss. This study represents preliminary evidence that children with hearing loss may develop phonological awareness differently than children with normal hearing and that language and educational experience are critical to understanding the phonological awareness performance in children with hearing loss.