Communication dynamics between mothers and their children with cochlear implants: Effects of maternal support for language production

Bidirectional language influence in mother–child interaction and its effects on the communicative development of children with cochlear implants: A longitudinal study

“…In line with previous studies on children with CIs (e.g. Lavelli et al, 2018), we expected maternal communicative behavior to influence and predict child communicative dynamics.…”

“…It is possible that discrepancies between findings depend on the other speaker's communicative behavior being overlooked. As argued by Lavelli et al (2018), mothers' communicative dynamics are always influenced by the child's communicative behavior (and vice versa): Mothers may talk more or use more reformulations in an attempt to fill the silence created by the absence of a response from the child, and these techniques may, in turn, foster or hinder language development. However, to our knowledge, no study has investigated both the effect of maternal input on the language of children with CIs over the first year after implantation and that of child language on maternal input in interaction.…”

“…One year after implantation, children with CIs still produce fewer words and fewer different words than their age-matched peers with NH (Kondaurova et al, 2020; Majorano et al, 2020). The developmental trajectory of communicative functions is less clear: In the Italian context, Rinaldi et al (2013) report that children with CIs tested between 7 and 25 months post-implantation are less able to initiate topics and make requests than age-matched peers with NH; whereas Lavelli et al (2018) report comparable proportions of initiatives and adequate responses in children with NH and in children with CIs tested between 12 and 38 months post-implantation.…”

Do Acoustic Environment Characteristics Affect the Lexical Development of Children With Cochlear Implants? A Longitudinal Study Before and After Cochlear Implant Activation

“…For this reason, future research should aim to include age at diagnosis as additional variable in path models describing the relationship between individual and environmental variables and lexical development in children with hearing loss. Another element that could be studied in a wider participant sample is parental input, which also affects child lexical development, as shown by previous studies (e.g., DesJardin & Eisenberg, 2007;Lavelli et al, 2018), and which could have possibly also affected our results. This idea is further reinforced by our finding that maternal education correlates with the children's lexical outcomes.…”

“…Among the most studied environmental factors, there are maternal language characteristics and the surrounding acoustic environment. As shown by several researchers, both maternal language quality and quantity play important roles in facilitating language production and in promoting language acquisition in cochlear-implanted children (DesJardin & Eisenberg, 2007;Lavelli et al, 2018;Majorano et al, 2018;Niparko et al, 2010;Pressman et al, 1999;Quittner et al, 2013;Szagun & Stumper, 2012;Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2001). More specifically, better language outcomes have been found when mothers use language facilitation strategies that are more consistent with their child's language level (Cruz et al, 2013), but also when children are exposed to more caregiver input in general (as measured using Language and ENvironmental Analysis [LENA]; Ambrose et al, 2014;Rufsvold et al, 2018).…”