Does a lack of auditory experience affect sequential learning?

Abstract

To understand the interaction between sensory experiences and cognition, it is critical to investigate the possibility that deprivation in one sensory modality might affect cognition in other modalities. Here we are concerned with the hypothesis that early experience with sound is vital to the development of domain-general sequential processing skills. In line with this hypothesis, a seminal empirical study found that prelingually deaf children had impaired sequence learning in the visual modality. In order to assess the limits of this hypothesis, the current study employed a different visual sequence learning task in an investigation of prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants and normal hearing children. Results showed statistically significant learning in each of the two groups, and no significant difference in the amount of learning between groups. Moreover, there was no association between the age at which the child received their implant (and thus access to electric hearing) and their performance on the sequential learning task. We discuss key differences between our study and the previous study, and argue that the field must reconsider claims about domain-general cognitive impairment resulting from early auditory deprivation.

Exploring in Silence: Hearing and Deaf Infants Explore Objects Differently Before Cochlear Implantation

“…Whether or not temporally organized auditory feedback from repetitive actions with objects (e.g., shaking noisy objects), as well as early spoken language experience, influences later sequential encoding and retrieval is unclear. Torkildsen, Arciuli, Haukedal, and Wie () recently found, however, that 7‐ to 12‐year‐old deaf children with cochlear implants showed implicit visual sequence learning comparable to that of hearing children.…”

Prosodic and segmental aspects of nonword repetition in 4- to 6-year-old children who are deaf and hard of hearing compared to controls with normal hearing

“…Further, the results provide little guidance to what specific aspects of language ability could potentially be predicted by NWR. The finding that hearing level was negatively correlated with repetition performance may indicate that the quality of auditory stimulation prior to HA fitting or cochlear implantation is important for NWR, together with a shorter period of auditory deprivation (Torkildsen, Arciuli, Haukedal, & Wie, 2018).…”

Deaf children need language, not (just) speech

“…If access to sound were necessary for healthy cognitive development, then all deaf children should be impacted -including those born into households where a sign language is the primary language (in fact, these children might be expected to be impacted most, as many do not routinely use any sort of hearing technology). Contrary to this prediction, recent studies with Deaf native signers have not found evidence of any difficulties in executive function Hall, M. L., Eigsti, B., & Lillo-Martin, D., 2018;Marshall et al, 2015) In addition, there are now three published failures to replicate original observations of an implicit sequence learning deficit in DHH children Klein, Walker, & Tomblin, 2018;Torkildsen, Arciuli, Haukedal, & Wie, 2018).…”