Is There a Relationship Between Infant and Toddler Speech Discrimination Abilities and Mean Length of Utterance at 33 Months?

This was a small pilot study with 50 children, and the analysis was exploratory rather than powered for the audiological and sociodemographic questions. All children with hearing loss met early identification and intervention milestones and were fitted with hearing aids by 6 months, so the results may not apply to children with later diagnosis, poorer access, or inconsistent amplification. The language sample was not structured, so differences in home activities, parent responses, and conversation topics may have affected utterance length and mental state verbs. Some children had missing data for ages at tasks or outcome measures, and the number analysed varied by outcome. Aided SII and datalogging were used as proxies for auditory access, but they do not fully capture what the child actually heard. The study did not examine parent-child interaction in detail, even though it can influence language outcomes. Because language measures at different ages were different constructs, the researchers used stratified simple regressions rather than a model that could account for repeated measures or multiple factors together.

Federal research grants funded the study. The supplied text names NIDCD, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, CCTSI under NCRR, and NIDILRR as funders. It does not report a commercial sponsor or an author conflict-of-interest statement.

Do not conclude that children with hearing loss have typical expressive language because they performed similarly to normal-hearing children on speech discrimination and word recognition. The children with hearing loss still had shorter utterances and used fewer mental state words at 33 months.