Predictors of Reading Comprehension in Children With Cochlear Implants

Abstract

Children with a profound hearing loss who have been implanted with cochlear implants (CI), vary in terms of their language and reading skills. Some of these children have strong language skills and are proficient readers whereas others struggle with language and both the decoding and comprehension aspects of reading. Reading comprehension is dependent on a number of skills where decoding, spoken language comprehension and receptive vocabulary have been found to be the strongest predictors of performance. Children with CI have generally been found to perform more poorly than typically hearing peers on most predictors of reading comprehension including word decoding, vocabulary and spoken language comprehension, as well as working memory. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the relationships between reading comprehension and a number of predictor variables in a sample of twenty-nine 11–12-year-old children with profound hearing loss, fitted with CI. We were particularly interested in the extent to which reading comprehension in children with CI at this age is dependent on decoding and receptive vocabulary. The predictor variables that we set out to study were word decoding, receptive vocabulary, phonological skills, and working memory. A second purpose was to explore the relationships between reading comprehension and demographic factors, i.e., parental education, speech perception and age of implantation. The results from these 29 children indicate that receptive vocabulary is the most influential predictor of reading comprehension in this group of children although phonological decoding is, of course, fundamental.

Sociodemographic Disparities in Pediatric Cochlear Implantation Access and Use: A Systematic Review

“…Concerning age at CI, Wass et al 45 found no association with parental university degree in Sweden, while Jeddi et al 22 found younger ages at CI with higher parental education in Iran.…”

Neurodevelopmental Aspects and Cortical Auditory Maturation in Children with Cochlear Implants

“…The delay in language acquisition in children with hearing loss later affects the learning process [ 3 ]. Receptive vocabulary is an important predictive factor in reading comprehension [ 36 ].…”

Differences and Similarities in the Contributions of Phonological Awareness, Orthographic Knowledge and Semantic Competence to Reading Fluency in Chinese School-Age Children With and Without Hearing Loss

“…TIn addition to the code-based skills such as PA and OK underlying reading, meaning-based skills (i.e., semantic competence) such as receptive vocabulary, quality of word representations, morphological awareness and listening comprehension are necessary to understand the decoded words, sentences and texts. For example, a number of studies found that large proportions of reading comprehension could be explained by variance in vocabulary once children with NH passed the early stages of reading development (Protopapas et al, 2007;Olson et al, 2011;Wass et al, 2019). Further, knowledge of word meaning contributed directly to reading comprehension (Ouellette and Beers, 2010;Perfetti and Stafura, 2014).…”

“…TIn children with HL, meaning-based skills have also been found to play important roles in reading (Lederberg et al, 2014;Wass et al, 2019). For example, in alphabetic writing systems, Connor and Zwolan (2004) found that vocabulary growth had a positive effect on passage comprehension in primary and middle school children with CIs and Von Muenster and Baker (2014) reported strong correlations between receptive/expressive language skills and passage reading comprehension in children with CIs aged 5-13 years.…”

“…There are large variations in reading outcomes among the children with HL, and some children's reading ability is even above the average grade level of their normal-hearing peers (Geers, 2003;Vermeulen et al, 2007;Geers et al, 2008). Many previous studies intended to improve reading instructions for children with HL have identified factors that contribute to reading achievements, among which phonological awareness (PA), orthographic knowledge (OK), and semantic competence (SC) are the main linguistic skills (Dillon et al, 2012;Von Muenster and Baker, 2014;Chan and Yang, 2018;Wass et al, 2019;Ingvalson et al, 2020).…”