The linguistic abilities of young children with hearing impairment: First report of a longitudinal study

Previous research suggests that the communicative competence of children with severe to profound hearing impairment varies greatly. However, this variation cannot simply be attributed to such obvious factors as mode of language learning or degree of hearing impairment. One way to investigate the factors underlying individual differences is by careful longitudinal description of the language acquisition of large groups of children with hearing impairment. This paper reports the initial findings of such a longitudinal study. The communicative abilities of 16 preschool children with severe to profound hearing impairment were assessed twice, over a period of eight months. All children attended preschool intervention programs where the mode of communication was simultaneously spoken and signed English. The assessment battery included standardised tests, as well as linguistic analyses of 30 minute language samples that included both signed and spoken data. The results revealed large individual differences in communicative competence between children during the preschool years. However, there was no reliable association between degree of hearing loss and performance on measures of communicative competence. There was a mismatch between language and cognitive abilities. Cognitive skills were age appropriate for most children, whereas their language abilities were poor in comparison. While the children's receptive language showed statistically significant improvement over the eight month period between assessments, their expressive skills showed little change. This last finding was surprising, given the children's exposure to, and use of, total communication. The implications of the results for the ways in which preschool intervention programmes might encourage the early language acquisition of preschool children with hearing impairment are discussed