Word Learning in Children With Cochlear Implants: Examining Performance Relative to Hearing Peers and Relations With Age at Implantation.
Hannah Pimperton, Elizabeth A Walker
PMID 29474219WHAT IT FOUND
Children with cochlear implants matched hearing peers in understanding new words but struggled to say them correctly.
Their speaking errors matched younger hearing children with similar vocabularies. Implant age did not predict word learning skills in this group.
Key findings
01Children with cochlear implants performed comparably to age-matched hearing peers on the comprehension component of the word learning task.
02Children with cochlear implants scored significantly lower than age-matched hearing peers on word production, but their performance was not different from vocabulary-matched younger hearing children.
03Within the cochlear implant group, age at implantation was not significantly related to performance on any component of the word learning task.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used an explicit learning task in a quiet room, which may not reflect the demands of incidental word learning in noisy, real-world environments. The sample size was small (21 children per group), leading to wide confidence intervals and potentially masking subtle effects. The children were all implanted before 3.5 years, so the results do not address whether age at implantation affects word learning in children implanted later. The study was cross-sectional, so it could not determine the directionality of the relationship between vocabulary size and word learning ability.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that age at implantation is irrelevant for all children. This study only looked at children implanted before 3.5 years. Other research suggests that implanting after this sensitive period may negatively impact word learning.