Emily Lund, Texas Christian University – Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children See Different Relationships Between Words
On Texas Christian University Week: Children who are deaf or hard of hearing may have a different relationship to language than other children.
Emily Lund, associate professor at the Davies School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, examines how to help bridge the gap.
Emily Lund is an Associate Professor in the Davies School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Texas Christian University (TCU). Her research focuses on language and literacy development in children with cochlear implants and hearing aids. She received her bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from Vanderbilt University. Her efforts have received consistent funding from the American Speech Hearing Foundation, NIH/NIDCD and the U.S. Department of Education.
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children See Different Relationships Between Words
Children who are deaf and hard of hearing and use cochlear implants or hearing aids to learn spoken language have smaller vocabularies than children with typical hearing. However, to date it is unclear whether having smaller vocabularies also means that children experience other types of word knowledge differences from their peers.
My colleagues and I wanted to know if using a cochlear implant or hearing aid changes how children mentally organize their words. Organization of words, also called lexical-semantic organization, is important because it influences how you recognize, recall and use the words that you know. As part of an ongoing longitudinal study, we assessed 109 children in kindergarten and first-grade, 63 with cochlear implants and hearing aids, and 46 with typical hearing.
Children participated in a repeated word association task: they had to tell us the first word they thought of when they heard a target word. We used their responses to determine how they were accessing their semantic networks. We found that all children linked words in increasingly mature semantic structures as they aged. However, children in the deaf and hard of hearing group produced links with either non-sense words or words not associated with the target about 25 percent of the time, with some children using unlinkable responses up to 57 percent of the time. Children with typical hearing did so in about 15 percent of their responses.
Our findings suggest that children who are learning spoken language through a hearing aid or cochlear implant may struggle to recognize the semantic relationships between words. This insight contributes to our understanding of additional speech and language therapy needs for children with cochlear implants and hearing aids: providing access to sound is a necessary first but not sufficient step for learning spoken language on the same trajectory as children with typical hearing.
Read More:
[National Library of Medicine] – Lexical–Semantic Organization as Measured by Repeated Word Association in Children Who Are Deaf and Hard of Hearing Who Use Spoken Language
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