Vocal Turn-Taking Between Mothers and Their Children With Cochlear Implants.
Maria V Kondaurova, Nicholas A Smith, Qi Zheng and 2 others
PMID 31436755WHAT IT FOUND
Mothers and children with cochlear implants took turns less often and spoke over each other more at 3 months after implant activation than hearing peers.
By 12 months, child turn-taking and overlap caught up, but mothers still followed their child less often.
Key findings
01At 3 months after cochlear implant activation, 0.67 of child vocalizations followed a mother vocalization in the implant group, compared with 0.88 in hearing children. By 12 months, the implant group reached 0.84 and the hearing group 0.82, with no significant difference.
02Mothers of children with implants included 0.21 of their vocalizations after a child vocalization, compared with 0.3 for hearing mothers. This difference did not change across sessions.
03At the first session, implant dyads had more simultaneous speech (0.13 versus 0.03) and longer maternal between-speaker pauses (0.69 seconds versus 0.52 seconds). At the second session, neither difference was significant.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small: 12 children with cochlear implants and 12 hearing children. The implant group had 2 girls and 10 boys, so sex differences cannot be separated from hearing status. The play samples were short, about 5 to 7 minutes, although they contained many vocalizations. Language outcomes were not collected consistently, so the paper cannot link turn-taking patterns to measured language development. The study observed children who had received cochlear implants and compared them with hearing children. It did not assign treatment or test an intervention, so it cannot show what caused the changes. Some timing labels are inconsistent: sessions are described as 3 and 12 months after activation, but some result summaries refer to 9 months post-CI.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. Mothers were reimbursed $10 per visit. No funding source or sponsor is stated.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the catch-up at 12 months as proof that cochlear implantation improves turn-taking. The study compared children who already had implants with hearing children and did not assign implants or intervention. It also did not consistently measure language outcomes.