Long-term effects of congenital hearing impairment on language performance in adults

Finite Verb Morphology in the Spontaneous Speech of Dutch-Speaking Children With Hearing Loss

“…Our findings are in line with Koehlinger et al (2013), who found that 38% to 63% of the children with mild to severe hearing loss (fitted with HAs) demonstrate a persistent risk in the acquisition of finite verb morphology. Other studies have shown that morphosyntactic errors can still be found in adolescents with HAs (Delage & Tuller 2007;Huysmans et al 2014). The children with CIs and HAs in this study both had low language production as indicated by low MLUs.…”

The Influence of Linguistic Proficiency on Masked Text Recognition Performance in Adults With and Without Congenital Hearing Impairment

“…X, XXX-XXX Kiese-Himmel 2008), and pragmatics (Elfenbein et al 1994). For CHI, the domain of morphosyntax is the most vulnerable linguistic area (Elfenbein et al 1994;Norbury et al 2001;McGuckian & Henry 2007), with the possibility of morphosyntactic weaknesses persisting into adolescence and adulthood (Delage & Tuller 2007;Huysmans et al 2014;Tuller & Delage 2014). When acquiring grammatical skills, perceptual salience of the morphological markers (i.e., the relative amount of linguistic information present in the acoustic signal to be perceived) influences the order in which grammatical skills are established (Svirsky et al 2002).…”

“…The observed similarity between the CHI and L2 population suggests that degraded auditory input during the critical period for language acquisition has similar effects on morphosyntax as later onset of language acquisition. The role of perceptual salience and relative syntactic complexity on the language performance in CHI subjects was reflected in the error patterns in the spoken language output of adults with moderate to severe CHI (i.e., pure-tone hearing thresholds between 35 and 95 dB HL) in a previous study (Huysmans et al 2014). The significantly reduced spoken language production performance of adults with moderate to severe CHI in this earlier study indicated that their hearing impairment resulted in at least a vulnerability of, and possibly a deficit in, morphosyntactic knowledge.…”

“…Based on the "distortion sensitivity approach" (van Schijndel et al 2001;Goverts & Houtgast 2010;Goverts et al 2011), the TRT task is administered with grammatically correct sentences and sentences in which a morphosyntactic distortion is applied. The introduced morphosyntactic error types are based on the common errors in the spoken language output of adults with moderate to severe CHI, as identified in our earlier study (Huysmans et al 2014). If TRT performance decreases when sentences are ungrammatical, this implies that the morphosyntactic information that is distorted in the sentence is normally used in sentence recognition.…”

“…However, less is known about how linguistic skills of hearing-impaired listeners impact their performance in language recognition, independent of bottom-up auditory processing. Specifically, in persons with congenital hearing impairment (henceforth CHI), this is an interesting question, because language acquisition with a degraded auditory input may lead to deficits in linguistic performance (Elfenbein et al 1994;Delage & Tuller 2007;Moeller et al 2007;Tuller & Delage 2014;Huysmans et al 2014). As linguistic knowledge is also relevant for language reception (Cutler & Clifton 1999) and this knowledge may be affected by CHI, top-down processing in language reception may be disadvantaged by CHI as well.…”