Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Print Knowledge in Preschool Children with Hearing Loss.
Emily Lund, Carly Miller, W Michael Douglas and 1 others
PMID 33981844WHAT IT FOUND
Preschoolers with hearing loss scored lower than peers on print knowledge items containing spatial or quantity words.
A pilot intervention teaching these concept words to four children showed immediate gains, suggesting vocabulary gaps may hide behind print assessment scores.
Key findings
01Children with hearing loss performed significantly lower than children with normal hearing on print knowledge items containing quantity and spatial/temporal concept words, but not on items without them.
02In a pilot intervention with four children, teaching concept vocabulary using a specific protocol led to immediate gains in understanding both the taught words and untaught concept types.
03Common print knowledge assessments like the PWPA rely heavily on spatial and temporal concept words, which may confound results for children with hearing loss who have vocabulary delays.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The intervention study included only four children, making it a pilot with very limited generalizability. Study 1 used a cross-sectional design, so it cannot determine if vocabulary delays cause print knowledge delays or if they co-occur. The study did not assess whether teaching concept vocabulary directly improved print knowledge scores, only that it improved vocabulary scores. Procedural fidelity was high for the four included children, but three other children were excluded due to low teacher fidelity, indicating the protocol can be difficult to implement consistently.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that teaching concept vocabulary will directly improve print knowledge scores. The study showed gains in vocabulary knowledge, but it did not test whether these gains translated to improved performance on print assessments.