Abstract
The present study investigated cognitive abilities (i.e. Phonological Processing Skills (PhPS), lexical access, complex and visual Working Memory (WM), and letter knowledge) in Deaf and Hard of Hearing children (DHH) 5, 6 and 7 years of age using cochlear implants or hearing aids. Children with Normal Hearing (NH) served as a reference group. All children took part of a computer-assisted intervention with a phonics approach for 4 weeks aimed to support PhPS. The first aim of the study was to examine associations between cognitive abilities and Phonological Processing Skills (PhPS) pre intervention in DHH and NH children respectively. The second aim was to examine cognitive predictors of phonological gain post intervention. Finally, the influence of background variables on phonological gain was examined in NH and DHH respectively and in DHH children with weak PhPS particularly. Results showed comparable performance level in NH and DHH children on the majority of cognitive tasks, but weaker PhPS and lexical access in the DHH children. A significant association between PhPS and complex WM was only evident in DHH children. This finding suggests that DHH recruit more cognitive resources in phonological processing. A phonological representation task was the single predictor of phonological gain in DHH children. Children with initial weak performance on this task but had letter-naming skills, displayed relatively more phonological gain from the phonics training. Children with difficulties with the phonological representation task were older when diagnosed and had an older age at amplification. Further, these children displayed broader cognitive difficulties, suggesting that reduced access to auditory stimulation may have wide ranging effects on cognitive development.
Highlights
Phonological processing is a central concept in cognitive psychology which is used to refer to mechanisms involved in representing, accessing or manipulating information related to the sound structure of language [1]
Normal Hearing (NH) and Deaf and Hard of Hearing children (DHH) children performed at comparable levels on all other measures; semantically deviant lexical access scores, complex and visual working memory, phonological latency scores and letter knowledge
Results showed that NH children outperformed DHH children on the task of lexical access and on the majority of the phonological processing tasks
Summary
Phonological processing is a central concept in cognitive psychology which is used to refer to mechanisms involved in representing, accessing or manipulating information related to the sound structure of language [1]. Phonological Processing Skills (PhPS) are a set of abilities that we use in many different contexts in everyday life. Due to their intimate connection to the sound structure of spoken language, there are many Deaf and Hard of Hearing children (DHH) who struggle to develop them [2,3,4]. PhPS are interconnected to the development of phonological decoding, a skill that is challenging to achieve for many profoundly deaf children [13,14,15]. The importance of PhPS in a vast number of communicative and learning situations makes it important to find efficient intervention methods for many DHH children [16]
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