Working memory and referential communication-multimodal aspects of interaction between children with sensorineural hearing impairment and normal hearing peers.

Whereas the language development of children with sensorineural hearing impairment (SNHI) has repeatedly been shown to differ from that of peers with normal hearing (NH), few studies have used an experimental approach to investigate the consequences on everyday communicative interaction. This mini review gives an overview of a range of studies on children with SNHI and NH exploring intra- and inter-individual cognitive and linguistic systems during communication. Over the last decade, our research group has studied the conversational strategies of Swedish speaking children and adolescents with SNHI and NH using referential communication, an experimental analog to problem-solving in the classroom. We have established verbal and non-verbal control and validation mechanisms, related to working memory capacity and phonological short term memory. We present main findings and future directions relevant for the field of cognitive hearing science and for the clinical and school-based management of children and adolescents with SNHI

On the interaction of speakers' voice quality, ambient noise and task complexity with children's listening comprehension and cognition.

Suboptimal listening conditions interfere with listeners' on-line comprehension. A degraded source signal, noise that interferes with sound transmission, and/or listeners' cognitive or linguistic limitations are examples of adverse listening conditions. Few studies have explored the interaction of these factors in pediatric populations. Yet, they represent an increasing challenge in educational settings. We will in the following report on our research and address the effect of adverse listening conditions pertaining to speakers' voices, background noise, and children's cognitive capacity on listening comprehension. Results from our studies clearly indicate that children risk underachieving both in formal assessments and in noisy class-rooms when an examiner or teacher speaks with a hoarse (dysphonic) voice. This seems particularly true when task complexity is low or when a child is approaching her/his limits of mastering a comprehension task

Quantifying Semantic Linguistic Maturity in Children

We propose a method to quantify semantic linguistic maturity (SELMA) based on a high dimensional semantic representation ofwords created from the co-occurrence of words in a large text corpus. The method was applied to oral narratives from 108 children aged 4;0–12;10. By comparing the SELMA measure with maturity ratings made by human raters we found that SELMA predicted the rating of semantic maturity made by human raters over and above the prediction made using a child’s age and number of words produced. We conclude that the semantic content of narratives changes in a predictable pattern with children’s age and argue that SELMA is a measure quantifying semantic linguistic maturity. The study opens up the possibility of using quantitative measures for studying the development of semantic representation in children’s narratives, and emphasizes the importance of word co-occurrences for understanding the development of meaning

The relationship between reading comprehension, working memory and language in children with cochlear implants

Working memory, language, and reading comprehension are strongly associated in children with severe and profound hearing impairment treated by cochlear implants (CI). In this study we explore this relationship in sixteen Swedish children with CI. We found that over 60% of the children with CI performed at the level of their hearing peers in a reading comprehension test. Demographic factors were not predictive of reading comprehension, but a complex working memory task was. Reading percentile was significantly correlated to the working memory test, but no other correlations between reading and cognitive/linguistic factors remained significant after age was factored out. Individual results from a comparison of the two best and the two poorest readers corroborate group results, confirming the important role of working memory for reading as measured by comprehension of words andmsentences in this group of children

Spoken and written narratives in Swedish children and adolescents with hearing impairment

Twenty 10- to 18-year-old children and adolescents with varying degrees of hearing impairment (HI) and hearing aids (HA), ranging from mild-moderate to severe, produced picture-elicited narratives in a spoken and written version. Their performance was compared to that of 63 normally hearing (NH) peers within the same age span. The participants with HI and NH showed similar patterns regarding intragroup correlations between corresponding measures of spoken and written narratives. However, the participants with HI had significantly less diverse language than the NH group. The participants with poorer hearing (higher best ear hearing level [BEHL]) produced spoken and written narratives comprising more content words and they also produced written narratives that were less lexically diverse than the participants with better hearing (lower BEHL). The difference as to lexical skills emphasizes the importance of focusing on these skills in the group of children with HI. However, the results give support for a quite optimistic view on the development of narration in children with HI with HA, at least for picture-elicited narratives

Patterns of vulnerability of language in children with severe developmental language disorders

Language disordered children with receptive language problems have worse outcome and also more severe problems in other areas of language than children with isolated expressive problems according to “the hypothesis of hierarchical vulnerability” formulated by Bishop and Edmundson (1987). We studied ten children with specific and severe developmental language disorders (DLD) longitudinally and found that the hypothesis was tenable with regard to the predictions about outcome. We also found that among children in the phonologic-syntactic subgroup (Rapin and Allen, 1983), children with poor comprehension and poor lexical-semantic ability had the most severe problems of syntax. Phonological production at ages 5 or 6 was not correlated to phonological production at age 8. Oral motor function, however, turned out to be an important prognostic factor for phonological outcome. The present findings call for revised methodological routines and therapeutical priorities regarding children with severe DLD

On language production in severe developmental language disorders and the concept of linguistic levels. A longitudinal study of ten children with severe development language disorders

On the basis of a neurolinguistic assessment procedure (Holmberg and Sahlen, 1986) ten children with severe and specific developmental language disorders (DLD) were studied over a four-year period. Initially they all showed global language problems which, in the course of development, became more specific. Although there were considerable differences in the neurolinguistic profiles, some general patterns were hypothesized. The linguistic analysis revealed some speech production correlates to these patterns. The results of the segmental phonological analysis and the grammatical analysis, however, did not reflect the differences between the neurolinguistic patterns. We argue that other, more dynamic aspects of language production, i.e. sentence prosody and speech rate, may better discriminate between children with different neurolinguistic patterns. A process-oriented approach to grammatical error analysis and the concept of linguistic levels are discussed

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