Emotion recognition and false belief in deaf or hard-of-hearing preschool children.
Emrah Akkaya, Murat Doğan
PMID 37805825WHAT IT FOUND
Four-to-five-year-old deaf children scored similarly to hearing peers on emotion recognition but lower on false belief.
The gap in understanding others' beliefs appeared around age five and a half. Earlier hearing aid use linked to better emotion scores, but implant age did not.
Key findings
01Emotion recognition scores did not differ significantly between deaf and hearing preschoolers, but hearing children scored significantly higher on false belief tasks.
02False belief performance gap emerged at approximately 5.5 years, with older hearing children outperforming deaf peers in the oldest age group.
03Among deaf children, earlier onset of hearing aid use correlated with higher emotion recognition scores, but age at cochlear implantation did not show a significant difference.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot track individual development over time. Parental education levels were significantly lower in the DHH group than the hearing group, which may have confounded the results since parental education correlated with false belief scores. Perspective-taking items were removed from the test battery after a pilot study showed they were not understood by either group, limiting the scope of ToM assessed. The sample was drawn from Turkey, where oral education is the norm and sign language is not used in schools, which may limit generalizability to other educational contexts.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the Anadolu University Scientific Research Projects Commission.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that cochlear implants improve social cognition based on this study. The age at implantation was not significantly related to false belief scores. The observed link to emotion recognition was associated with earlier hearing aid use, not implant status.