Abstract
Children with hearing impairment show difficulties in sentences derived by Wh-movement, such as relative clauses and Wh-questions. This study examines the nature of this deficit in 48 hearing impaired children aged 9–12 years and 38 hearing controls. The task involved reading aloud and paraphrasing of object relatives that include a noun-verb heterophonic homograph. The correct pronunciation of the homograph in these sentences depended upon the correct construction of the syntactic structure of the sentence. An analysis of the reading and paraphrasing of each participant exposed two different patterns of syntactic impairment. Some hearing-impaired children paraphrased the object relatives incorrectly but could still read the homograph, indicating impaired assignment of thematic roles alongside good syntactic structure building; other hearing-impaired children could neither read the homograph nor paraphrase the sentence, indicating a structural deficit in the syntactic tree. Further testing of these children confirmed the different impairments: some are impaired only in Wh-movement, whereas others have CP impairment. The syntactic impairment correlated with whether or not a hearing device was fitted by the age of 1 year, but not with the type of hearing device or the depth of hearing loss: children who had a hearing device fitted during the first year of life had better syntactic abilities than children whose hearing devices were fitted later.
Highlights
One subgroup of hearing impaired children read the homographs in the object relative clauses correctly, much like the controls, but failed to explain the meaning of the object relative clauses
We classified each participant in the group of children with hearing impairment into the subgroups according to whether s/he failed in reading and whether s/he failed in paraphrasing compared to the hearing control group
The main questions of this study related to the nature of the syntactic deficit in hearing impairment, a question that took an interesting turn once we analyzed the individual profile of the participants rather than the group’s, and to the relation between the syntactic impairment and reading in this population
Summary
Children with hearing impairment encounter difficulties in understanding non-canonical sentences that are derived by movement of phrases (Berent, 1988, 1996a,b; De Villiers et al, 1994; Friedmann and Szterman, 2006, 2011; Friedmann et al, 2010). This deficit probably stems from limited language input during the critical period for the acquisition of the syntax of a first language (Yoshinaga-Itano and Apuzzo, 1998a,b; Mayberry et al, 2002, 2011; Yoshinaga-Itano, 2003; Friedmann and Szterman, 2006). Studies that assessed the syntactic abilities of English-, Hebrew-, Palestinian Arabic-, and Italian-speaking hearing impaired children found difficulties in the comprehension and production of object relative clauses (English: Quigley et al, 1974a; Berent, 1988; De Villiers, 1988, Hebrew: Szterman and Friedmann, 2003, 2007; Friedmann and Szterman, 2006, 2011; Friedmann et al, 2010, Arabic: Haddad-Hanna and Friedmann, 2009; Friedmann et al, 2010; Friedmann and Haddad-Hanna, 2014; and Italian: Volpato and Adani, 2009), in the comprehension and production of object questions (English: Quigley et al, 1974b; Berent, 1996b, Hebrew: Nave et al, 2009; Friedmann and Szterman, 2011; Szterman and Friedmann, 2014, Standard Arabic and Palestinian Arabic: Friedmann et al, 2010; Haddad-Hanna and Friedmann, 2014), and in the comprehension of topicalization structures (Hebrew: Friedmann and Szterman, 2006, Arabic: Haddad-Hanna and Friedmann, 2009; Friedmann and Haddad-Hanna, 2014)
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