The Phonics Approach in Swedish Children using Cochlear Implants or Hearing Aids: Inspecting Phonological Gain

Abstract

The present study investigated cognitive abilities (i.e. Phonological Processing Skills (PhPS), lexical access, complex and visual Working Memory (WM), and letter knowledge) in Deaf and Hard of Hearing children (DHH) 5, 6 and 7 years of age using cochlear implants or hearing aids. Children with Normal Hearing (NH) served as a reference group. All children took part of a computer-assisted intervention with a phonics approach for 4 weeks aimed to support PhPS. The first aim of the study was to examine associations between cognitive abilities and Phonological Processing Skills (PhPS) pre intervention in DHH and NH children respectively. The second aim was to examine cognitive predictors of phonological gain post intervention. Finally, the influence of background variables on phonological gain was examined in NH and DHH respectively and in DHH children with weak PhPS particularly. Results showed comparable performance level in NH and DHH children on the majority of cognitive tasks, but weaker PhPS and lexical access in the DHH children. A significant association between PhPS and complex WM was only evident in DHH children. This finding suggests that DHH recruit more cognitive resources in phonological processing. A phonological representation task was the single predictor of phonological gain in DHH children. Children with initial weak performance on this task but had letter-naming skills, displayed relatively more phonological gain from the phonics training. Children with difficulties with the phonological representation task were older when diagnosed and had an older age at amplification. Further, these children displayed broader cognitive difficulties, suggesting that reduced access to auditory stimulation may have wide ranging effects on cognitive development.

Intensive computer-based phonics training in the educational setting of children with Down syndrome: An explorative study

“…In these studies, children on average practiced with the program for 7 min each day for 4 weeks. The results were promising, particularly for DHH children with an initially weak phonological status, who improved their phonological skills (Nakeva von Mentzer, 2014b). Also, a significant correlation between letter knowledge and phonological gain was observed only in children with weak phonological skills.…”

“…Several studies have reported a positive effect of GG on word-decoding ability in elementary school children at risk for reading disorders (Kyle et al, 2013;Lyytinen et al, 2009;Saine et al, 2011). During 2010-2012, a Swedish version of GG served as an intervention tool for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children using cochlear implants and/or hearing aids (Nakeva von Mentzer et al, 2013, 2014a, 2014b. In these studies, children on average practiced with the program for 7 min each day for 4 weeks.…”

“…Also, a significant correlation between letter knowledge and phonological gain was observed only in children with weak phonological skills. Nakeva von Mentzer et al (2014b) reasoned that letter knowledge may be specifically important in these children, as letters could work as a facilitator in developing PA. In summary, GG focuses on auditory identification of speech sounds and their corresponding letters and provides reading games for blending speech sounds into words with the aim to support automatization.…”

Semantic Processing in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children: Large N400 Mismatch Effects in Brain Responses, Despite Poor Semantic Ability

“…With a small vocabulary, an underdeveloped semantic structure (i.e., the taxonomic, associative or similarity-based relations between words) could also be expected, but research indicates a large heterogeneity among DHH children (Peterson et al, 2010 ; Löfkvist et al, 2012 ; Kenett et al, 2013 ; Li et al, 2013 ; Nakeva von Mentzer, 2014 ). In fact, semantic and other cognitive cues may play a more important role in linguistic processing of DHH children, as a means to compensate for poor phonological skills (Lyxell et al, 2009 ; Nakeva von Mentzer et al, 2014a ). What cannot be extracted from the speech signal bottom-up might be inferred using top-down processes (Wingfield and Tun, 2007 ).…”

The Effect of Phonological Awareness on the Auditory Memory in Students With Spelling Problems

“…Sound awareness helps children to classify words coming from the speech and then write them. Nakeva et al [22] argued that children with difficulties with the phonological representation task were older when diagnosed and had an older age at amplification. Further, these children displayed broader cognitive difficulties, suggesting that reduced access to auditory stimulation may have wide-ranging effects on cognitive development.…”