Severe-To-Profound Hearing-Impaired Children's Comprehension of Figurative Language

Comprehension of Figurative Language by Hearing Impaired Children in Special Primary Schools

Eleven hearing-impaired children and 11 normal-hearing children (mean = four years 11 months) were visually presented familiar items in either picture or word form. Subjects were asked to recognize the stimuli they had seen from cue cards consisting of pictures or words. They were then asked to recall the sequence of stimuli by arranging the cue cards selected. The hearing-impaired group and normal-hearing subjects performed differently with the picture/picture (P/P) and word/word (W/W) modes in the recognition phase. The hearing impaired performed equally well with both modes (P/P and W/W), while the normal hearing did significantly better on the P/P mode. Furthermore, the normal-hearing group showed no difference in processing like modes (P/P and W/W) when compared to unlike modes (W/P and P/W). In contrast, the hearing-impaired subjects did better on like modes. The results were interpreted, in part, as supporting the position that young normal-hearing children dual code their visual information better than hearing-impaired children.

Computer-assisted reading intervention for children with sensorineural hearing loss using hearing aids: Effects on auditory event-related potentials and mismatch negativity

Objective: The aim of this study was to develop Greek sentence-based speech audiometry test in quiet test for hearing-impaired (HI) children (G-SEBSAT).Methods: Seventy-six children were recruited following approval by the local ethics committee and after obtaining informed consent from their parents. The collection of vocabulary was based on showing pictures selected from popular reading materials in Greek to HI children. A grammatical content analysis was carried out to determine the average syntactic and morphological structures of the sentences used by the HI children. Ten picture-related sentence lists were developed based on the vocabulary and the grammatical analysis, and recorded by a male native speaker of standard Modern Greek. These were presented to both normal-hearing (NH) and HI children, and the average speech response threshold (SRT) as well as the slope of the SRT curve at the SRT level of 50% correct responses (S50) were recorded in both groups. Sentence lists were validated with respect to the variability of their difficulty within each group, as well the test-retest variability of the respective SRT scores.Results: The average SRT across all lists for HI children was 65.27 dB and the slope of the SRT curve at the SRT level of 50% correct responses was 3.11%/dB. The corresponding results across all lists for NH children were 17.66 dB and 9.7%/dB, respectively. The SRT of HI children were strongly positively correlated, in a statistically significant manner with the pure tone audiogram (PTA) in both the test and the retest sessions (test: r = 0.750, p < .0005; retest: r = 0.753, p < .0005). The Spearman’s correlation of the rankings of SRT values and the slope values was 0.998 and 0.997, respectively, for the HI and 0.939 and 0.88, for the NH group, indicating very low variability across the test and retest sessions. In addition, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the average SRT in NH children and the SRT residuals in the HI group indicated that the different sentences were of the same difficulty within each group. ((F(9,81) = 0.401, p = .930 and (F(9,93) = 2.241, p = .025, respectively).Conclusions: A validated G-SEBSAT was created in Greek for the first time. SRT and S50 values for both NH and HI children are comparable to similar tests developed in other languages.

Previous studies have shown that comprehension of figurative language is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, most studies have focused on lexicalized expressions and have only examined performance at one particular point in time, without examining how performance changes over development. The current study examined the comprehension of novel metaphor and metonymy in individuals with ASDs from a large age range, using both a cross-sectional (Experiment 1) and longitudinal design (Experiment 2). Performance in the ASD group was lower compared to typically developing (TD) controls, across all ages. Importantly, the results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that, although chronological age was not a good predictor for performance of either novel metaphor or metonymy in the cross-sectional design, performance improved when longitudinal data was considered. Correlations between vocabulary knowledge, visuo-spatial abilities and figurative language comprehension abilities were also explored.

This study examined relationships among sound level, subjective loudness, and reaction time in listeners with longstanding sensorineural hearing loss and loudness recruitment. A simple reaction-time test was performed by 10 hearing-impaired (HI) subjects with varying degrees of recruitment and by 10 normal-hearing (NH) control subjects. Both groups listened to 0.5 kHz tones presented at a soft level, representing the soft endpoint of a subject's functional dynamic range, and a loud level representing the loud endpoint. In one condition, the loudness level of stimuli within a block was fixed, and hence predictable; in another it varied randomly within a block between loud and soft, adding uncertainty to the simple reaction time task. A test with exactly the same design but using visual stimuli was also performed. 1) In general, the HI subjects responded to auditory stimuli with normal or near-normal mean reaction times when stimulus loudness was predictable. 2) Introduction of uncertainty disrupted the reaction time performance of some, but not all, of the HI subjects. 3) Both the HI and the NH subjects responded more quickly to loud tones than to soft ones. Under the predictable loudness condition the magnitude of this "speed up" was nearly identical for the two groups despite the fact that the HI group had, on average, only half the physical dynamic range of the NH group. 4) Visual reaction-time performance was equivalent between the HI and NH groups in all important respects. Despite long-term auditory deficits, HI subjects' ability to respond quickly to simple auditory signals is not substantially impaired, particularly when listening under predictable loudness conditions. Although physical soft-loud ranges will generally be narrower than normal for HI subjects, their reaction time performance at the endpoints of that range is likely to be near normal.

This paper focuses on the oral referential communication skills of hearing-impaired (HI) children. A task based on that used with language impaired children by Leinonen and Letts (1997) was used to assess the speaking and listening skills of 20 HI children (mean age=10;2 years; mean better ear average hearing loss=88.85 dBHL). Their performance was then compared to that of a group of younger normally hearing (NH) children (mean age=6;9 years). The findings were suggestive of a developmental lag in speaking and listening skills in some of the HI group. In addition, significant negative correlations were found between measures of listener performance and scores on the Test for Reception of Grammar (Bishop, 1989), which suggested that the detection and evaluation stages of Ackerman's (1983) model of message disambiguation might be related to linguistic competence. Differential performances within the HI group, and between the HI and NH groups, and the utility of the referential communication task for...

This paper focuses on the oral referential communication skills of hearing-impaired (HI) children. A task based on that used with language impaired children by Leinonen and Letts (1997) was used to assess the speaking and listening skills of 20 HI children (mean age=10;2 years; mean better ear average hearing loss=88.85 dBHL). Their performance was then compared to that of a group of younger normally hearing (NH) children (mean age=6;9 years). The findings were suggestive of a developmental lag in speaking and listening skills in some of the HI group. In addition, significant negative correlations were found between measures of listener performance and scores on the Test for Reception of Grammar (Bishop, 1989), which suggested that the detection and evaluation stages of Ackerman's (1983) model of message disambiguation might be related to linguistic competence. Differential performances within the HI group, and between the HI and NH groups, and the utility of the referential communication task for teachers, clinicians and researchers are discussed.

Glossometric measures of tongue positions of 10 normal-hearing (NH) and 10 profoundly hearing-impaired (HI) children were compared during production of the eight vowels /i,I,E,ae,u,U,o,a/. The NH subjects used tongue positions with distinct vertical distances from the hard palate and discrete tongue shapes to distinguish the front vowels and the back vowels. The HI subjects produced vowels using a reduced vertical range and singular flat, high-back tongue shape. Token-to-token variability was greater for the HI subjects. Listener identifications of the vowels produced by the HI subjects fell in three categories: highly variable responses to /i/, low vowels for /I,E,ae,a/, and back vowels for /u,U,o/. The centralized, generally undifferentiated tongue positions and listener identifications for the HI subjects coincided with suppositions made from previous perceptual, acoustic, and physiologic findings.

We present a meta-analysis of studies that compare figurative language comprehension in individuals with autism spectrum disorder and in typically developing controls who were matched based on chronological age or/and language ability. A total of 41 studies and 45 independent effect sizes were included based on predetermined inclusion criteria. Group matching strategy, age, types of figurative language, and cross-linguistic differences were examined as predictors that might explain heterogeneity in effect sizes. Overall, individuals with autism spectrum disorder showed poorer comprehension of figurative language than their typically developing peers (Hedges’ g = –0.57). A meta-regression analysis showed that group matching strategy and types of figurative language were significantly related to differences in effect sizes, whereas chronological age and cross-linguistic differences were not. Differences between the autism spectrum disorder and typically developing groups were small and nonsignificant when the groups were matched based on the language ability. Metaphors were more difficult to comprehend for individuals with autism spectrum disorder compared with typically developing controls than were irony and sarcasm. Our findings highlight the critical role of core language skills in figurative language comprehension. Interventions and educational programmes designed to improve social communication skills in individuals with autism spectrum disorder may beneficially target core language skills in addition to social skills.

Tweny-three severely hearing-impaired adolescents and five normal-hearing students participated in this study. The hearing-impaired subjects ranged in chronological age from 11 years, 9 months to 18 years, 3 months (mean = 15 years, 3 months). All subjects had a pre-lingual unaided hearing loss of 70 to 100 dB in the speech range (mean = 89 dB). The hearing-impaired subjects were grouped according to the communication mode used at school in instructional situations (i.e., cued speech, manually-coded English, or oral-aural). The subjects were presented with 4 modified, Piagetian conservation problems and 10 linguistically-sensitive metaphor stories. While the cued speech group performed higher than any other group on the conservation problems and the oral-aural group performed better on the metaphoric problems than the other two hearing-impaired groups, the performance differences among and between them were not statistically significant.

Eye problems in children with hearing impairment

Children with hearing impairment (HI) show disorders in syntax and morphology. The question is whether and how these disorders are connected to problems in the auditory domain. The aim of this paper is to examine whether moderate to severe hearing loss at a young age affects the ability of German-speaking orally trained children to understand and produce sentences. We focused on sentence structures that are derived by syntactic movement, which have been identified as a sensitive marker for syntactic impairment in other languages and in other populations with syntactic impairment. Therefore, our study tested subject and object relatives, subject and object Wh-questions, passive sentences, and topicalized sentences, as well as sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. We tested 19 HI children aged 9;5–13;6 and compared their performance with hearing children using comprehension tasks of sentence-picture matching and sentence repetition tasks. For the comprehension tasks, we included HI children who passed an auditory discrimination task; for the sentence repetition tasks, we selected children who passed a screening task of simple sentence repetition without lip-reading; this made sure that they could perceive the words in the tests, so that we could test their grammatical abilities. The results clearly showed that most of the participants with HI had considerable difficulties in the comprehension and repetition of sentences with syntactic movement: they had significant difficulties understanding object relatives, Wh-questions, and topicalized sentences, and in the repetition of object who and which questions and subject relatives, as well as in sentences with verb movement to second sentential position. Repetition of passives was only problematic for some children. Object relatives were still difficult at this age for both HI and hearing children. An additional important outcome of the study is that not all sentence structures are impaired—passive structures were not problematic for most of the HI children

This article reports on the comprehension and production of figurative language, namely idioms and similes, in first language Afrikaans-speaking (AFR) boys, ages eight to 10 years, and first language Afrikaans-speaking boys with specific language impairment (SLI), also ages eight to 10. It draws on a larger study by Van der Merwe (2007; see also Van der Merwe & Southwood, 2008). Testing of the comprehension and production abilities of the children was conducted verbally and individually and elicited their understanding of 25 idioms and 25 similes. The idioms were first presented without context; if the child gave an incorrect interpretation, the idiom was placed in context. Raw scores show that the SLI group performed marginally more poorly than the AFR group, but there was no statistically significant difference between the comprehension of idioms by the two groups. The same can be said for the number of literal interpretations provided by the groups. Placing the idioms in context was beneficial to both groups. The simile completion task required the children to provide the last word of each simile. For both groups, the similes task proved to be easier than the idioms task but there was again no statistically significant difference found between the two groups. The results seem to imply that children at this developmental phase, aged eight to 10, whether language impaired or not, have not yet fully grasped figurative language as a concept and need explicit instructions on figurative language. The article ends with a reflection on the suitability of idioms and similes as particular categories of figurative language in studies of this nature.

The clinical balance performance of normal-hearing (NH) children was compared with the balance performance of hearing-impaired (HI) children with and without vestibular dysfunction to identify an association between vestibular function and motor performance. Prospective study. Tertiary referral center. Thirty-six children (mean age, 7 yr 5 mo; range, 3 yr 8 mo-12 yr 11 mo) divided into three groups: NH children with normal vestibular responses, HI children with normal vestibular responses, and HI children with abnormal vestibular function. A vestibular test protocol (rotatory and collic vestibular evoked myogenic potential testing) in combination with three clinical balance tests (balance beam walking, one-leg hopping, one-leg stance). Clinical balance performance. HI children with abnormal vestibular test results obtained the lowest quotients of motor performance, which were significantly lower compared with the NH group (p < 0.001 for balance beam walking and one-leg stance; p = 0.003 for one-leg hopping). The balance performance of the HI group with normal vestibular responses was better in comparison with the vestibular impaired group but still significantly lower compared with the NH group (p = 0.020 for balance beam walking; p = 0.001 for one-leg stance; not significant for one-leg hopping). These results indicate an association between vestibular function and motor performance in HI children, with a more distinct motor deterioration if a vestibular impairment is superimposed to the auditory dysfunction.