Home language maintenance in bilingual children with normal hearing and with hearing loss who use cochlear implants.
Ferenc Bunta, Anny Castilla-Earls
PMID 34647514WHAT IT FOUND
Bilingual children with cochlear implants kept their home language, Spanish, but less than matched peers with normal hearing.
Both groups retained more than half of Spanish items over time. Maternal education was linked to better maintenance in the implant group.
Key findings
01Children with normal hearing scored higher than children with cochlear implants on language and word recognition at both time points.
02Children with normal hearing maintained 89.82% of Spanish items, compared with 68.25% for children with cochlear implants.
03For children with cochlear implants, mothers with high school education or above were associated with better Spanish maintenance; no such association was found for children with normal hearing.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 22 children, 11 with normal hearing and 11 with cochlear implants, so results may not generalise. The analyses were not originally pre-planned, and the maternal education finding was post-hoc. The follow-up interval was about 7 months, which may be too short to capture language shift over time. The dual-language test cannot estimate how many items a child knows in English. Socio-economic status and maternal education were not matched carefully across groups. The cochlear implant group showed wide individual variation, from 8.33% to 100% Spanish maintenance. The study only included Spanish- and English-speaking children, so findings may not apply to other home languages.
Declared interests
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that cochlear implants cause loss of Spanish. The children with implants still maintained Spanish, though less than their normal-hearing peers, and the study compared existing groups.