Acquisition of Tense Marking in English-Speaking Children with Cochlear Implants: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

This study investigated the development of tense markers (e.g., past tense -ed) in children with cochlear implants (CIs) over a 3-year span. Nine children who received CIs before 30 months of age participated in this study at three, four, and five years postimplantation. Nine typical 3-, 4-, and 5-year- olds served as control groups. All children participated in a story-retell task. Percent correct of tense marking in the task was computed. Within the groups, percent correct of tense marking changed significantly in children with CIs and in typical children who had more hearing experience. Across the groups, children with CIs were significantly less accurate in tense marking than typical children at four and five years postimplantation. In addition, the performance of tense marking in children with CIs was correlated with their speech perception skills at earlier time points. Errors of tense marking tended to be omission rather than commission errors in typical children as well as in children with CIs. The findings suggested that despite the perceptual and processing constraints, children who received CIs may learn tense marking albeit with a delayed pattern.

Development of Grammatical Accuracy in English-Speaking Children With Cochlear Implants: A Longitudinal Study

“…(d) Would children with CIs demonstrate different patterns of grammatical errors from their age-matched peers with typical hearing? On the basis of previous studies (Chilosi et al, 2013;Guo et al, 2013;Nicholas & Geers, 2007;Nikolopoulos et al, 2004), we predicted that PGCU would increase over developmental time in children with CIs. We also predicted that children with CIs would produce PGCU at a lower level as compared with their age-matched peers with typical hearing, given the auditory-perceptual and cognitive-processing constraints.…”

“…Although some studies (e.g., Guo et al, 2013) have found that English-speaking children with CIs produce more errors in marking verb tense than children with typical hearing, few if any have systematically examined other types of grammatical errors (e.g., argument structure, word order) in this population.…”

“…Lagged correlation allows us to determine how speech-perception skills are associated with grammatical accuracy over developmental time (Huttenlocher et al, 2010). Previous studies have found that English-speaking children with CIs who have better speech-perception skills tend to produce grammatical morphemes with higher accuracy than those who have poorer speech-perception skills (Guo et al, 2013). One interpretation of this finding is that English grammatical morphemes tend to be weak in energy and short in duration (i.e., acoustically insalient).…”

“…Nine of the 10 children were also participants in a prior study (Guo et al, 2013). All 10 children received unilateral cochlear implantation between the years of 1997 and 2001 and remained unilateral CI users at the time of data collection (i.e., between the years of 2000 and 2006).…”

“…Moreover, it has yet to be determined whether English-speaking children with CIs demonstrate different patterns of grammatical errors when they produce sentences. To the best of our knowledge, although some studies have found that English-speaking children with CIs produce verb tense (e.g., past tense -ed ) with lower accuracy than children with typical hearing (Guo, Spencer, & Tomblin, 2013;Svirsky, Stallings, Ying, Lento, & Leonard, 2002), no existing studies have systematically documented grammatical errors in English-speaking children with CIs.…”