Emotion Understanding in Preschool Children with Mild-to-Severe Hearing Loss.
Nina J Laugen, Karl H Jacobsen, Carolien Rieffe and 1 others
PMID 27881481WHAT IT FOUND
Preschool children with mild-to-severe hearing loss and hearing aids scored similarly to typically hearing children on emotion understanding, despite lower vocabulary scores.
Parents of children with hearing aids estimated their child's level more accurately, although both groups overestimated it.
Key findings
01Preschool children with hearing aids did not differ from typically hearing children in total emotion understanding, even after vocabulary and parent accuracy were considered.
02Parents of children with hearing aids were more accurate at estimating their child's emotion understanding than parents of typically hearing children.
03Better vocabulary and more accurate parent estimates were associated with higher child emotion understanding.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study was cross-sectional, so it cannot show that parent accuracy caused higher child emotion understanding. The hearing-aid group had only 35 children, so smaller or subgroup differences could be missed. The authors did not know why 43 invited families did not participate, so families who agreed may differ from those who did not. The sample included only children with mild-to-severe hearing loss who used hearing aids and had no known additional diagnoses, so results do not apply to children with cochlear implants, profound hearing loss, or other diagnoses. Only spoken Norwegian vocabulary was measured; sign language skills were not assessed, so total language ability may be underestimated in children who use signs. The emotion test relies on spoken stories, so hearing-aid children may have found it harder to hear or understand than the test score alone shows. The findings are from Norwegian families, and the authors caution that parent awareness and emotion understanding may differ across cultures.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that hearing loss has no effect on social-emotional development. The study compared only preschoolers with mild-to-severe hearing loss who used hearing aids, had no known additional diagnoses, and had lower vocabulary scores; it found no difference in total emotion understanding, not that hearing loss is irrelevant. The parent accuracy result is an association from a cross-sectional comparison, not proof that helping parents estimate better will improve child emotion understanding.