Naturalistic Use of Aspect Morphology in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children.
Kristina Bowdrie, Rachael Frush Holt, Andrew Blank and 1 others
PMID 33880987WHAT IT FOUND
Deaf and hard-of-hearing children paired past tense and -ing forms with event types like normal-hearing peers.
Reduced acoustic access did not disrupt this grammatical aspect pattern. They still produced fewer past tense forms and fewer final consonant clusters.
Key findings
01Deaf and hard-of-hearing children and normal-hearing children both favored the expected pairings of past tense with events that had a clear endpoint and -ing with events that did not.
02Deaf and hard-of-hearing children produced fewer past tense forms and more -ing forms than normal-hearing children.
03Deaf and hard-of-hearing children produced fewer words with final consonant clusters than normal-hearing children.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The deaf and hard-of-hearing group was heterogeneous, with hearing loss ranging from mild to profound. Audiometric thresholds were obtained for only 11 children with hearing aids and 2 children with cochlear implants, so hearing status was not fully measured for the whole group. Children with hearing aids and children with cochlear implants were combined into one group to increase power. The sample size may have prevented detection of some effects. The analysis used free-play speech only, so it may not reflect elicited production or comprehension of aspect. The paper did not directly test children's semantic interpretations of aspect combinations. The study was observational, so it cannot show that reduced hearing access caused any language outcome.
Declared interests
The supplied publication types include Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural. The article text does not include an author conflict-of-interest declaration.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that deaf and hard-of-hearing children have typical language overall. The null result was specific to how aspect forms paired with event types. The deaf and hard-of-hearing children still produced fewer past tense forms and fewer final consonant clusters, and they scored lower than normal-hearing children on several standardized language measures.