Novel word learning and its relation to working memory and language in children with mild-to-moderate hearing impairment and children with specific language impairment

Twelve children with mild/moderate hearing impairment (HI) and 12 children with specific language impairment (SLI), 5 - 9 years old, were assessed in order to compare novel word learning and to study cognitive and linguistic predictors for word learning. There was no significant difference on novel word learning between the groups. The strongest predictor for novel word learning was a lexical measure. When 22 of the participants were categorized as high versus low performing children, the children with HI and SLI were equally distributed. Low performers on novel word learning were significantly poorer on non-word repetition, lexicon and language comprehension than high performers. Our data are inconclusive as to the influence of hearing levels in children with HI as a group, but individual results indicate sensory as well cognitive mechanisms behind poor word learning. Generally, our data support earlier findings showing that novel word learning is easier the richer the child's vocabulary and the better the phonological short-term memory