Phonological awareness, reading skills, and vocabulary knowledge in children who use cochlear implants.

In hearing children, reading skills have been found to be closely related to phonological awareness. We used several standardized tests to investigate the reading and phonological awareness skills of 27 deaf school-age children who were experienced cochlear implant users. Approximately two-thirds of the children performed at or above the level of their hearing peers on the phonological awareness and reading tasks.

Visual-motor integration skills of prelingually deaf children: implications for pediatric cochlear implantation.

Objective: To investigate visual-motor integration (VI) skills of prelingually deaf (PLD) children before and after cochlear implantation (CI) and investigate correlations with spoken-language and related processing measures.

Design: Study 1 was a longitudinal study in which VI was tested preimplant. Study 2 was a cross sectional study of school-age children who used a CI for >2 years.

Nonword repetition with spectrally reduced speech: some developmental and clinical findings from pediatric cochlear implantation.

Nonword repetition skills were examined in 24 pediatric cochlear implant (CI) users and 18 normal-hearing (NH) adult listeners listening through a CI simulator. Two separate groups of NH adult listeners assigned accuracy ratings to the nonword responses of the pediatric CI users and the NH adult speakers. Overall, the nonword repetitions of children using CIs were rated as more accurate than the nonword repetitions of the adults.

Neuropsychological correlates of vocabulary, reading, and working memory in deaf children with cochlear implants.

The performance of deaf children with cochlear implants was assessed using measures standardized on hearing children. To investigate nonverbal cognitive and sensorimotor processes associated with postimplant variability, five selected sensorimotor and visuospatial subtests from A Developmental Neuropsychological Assessment (NEPSY) were compared with standardized vocabulary, reading, and digit span measures. Participants were 26 deaf children, ages 6-14 years, who received a cochlear implant between ages 1 and 6 years; duration of implant use ranged from 3 to 11 years.

Non word Repetition and Reading Skills in Children Who Are Deaf and Have Cochlear Implants.

Reading skills in hearing children are closely related to their phonological processing skills, often measured using a nonword repetition task in which a child relies on abstract phonological representations in order to decompose, encode, rehearse in working memory and reproduce novel phonological patterns. In the present study of children who are deaf and have cochlear implants, we found that nonword repetition performance was significantly related to nonword reading, single word reading and sentence comprehension. Communication mode and nonverbal IQ were also found to be correlated with nonword repetition and reading skills.

Nonword repetition by children with cochlear implants: accuracy ratings from normal-hearing listeners.

Seventy-six children with cochlear implants completed a nonword repetition task. The children were presented with 20 nonword auditory patterns over a loud-speaker and were asked to repeat them aloud to the experimenter. The children's responses were recorded on digital audiotape and then played back to normal-hearing adult listeners to obtain accuracy ratings on a 7-point scale.

Imitation of nonwords by hearing-impaired children with cochlear implants: segmental analyses.

The phonological processing skills of 24 pre-lingually deaf 8- and 9-year-old experienced cochlear implant users were measured using a nonword repetition task. The children heard recordings of 20 nonwords and were asked to repeat each pattern as accurately as possible. Detailed segmental analyses of the consonants in the children's imitation responses were carried out.

Imitation of nonwords by hearing impaired children with cochlear implants: suprasegmental analyses.

In this study, we examined two prosodic characteristics of speech production in 8-10-year-old experienced cochlear implant (CI) users who completed a nonword repetition task. We looked at how often they correctly reproduced syllable number and primary stress location in their responses. Although only 5% of all nonword imitations were produced correctly without errors, 64% of the imitations contained the correct syllable number and 61% had the correct placement of primary stress.

Nonword repetition and reading in deaf children with cochlear implants.

In this study, we report analyses of nonword repetition responses from 76 experienced pediatric cochlear implants users. Nonword repetition performance reflects the participants' reliance on their phonological system, which has been found to be related to phonological awareness skills and reading in normal-hearing children. We found that nonword repetition performance was strongly correlated with several measures of reading readiness and reading in deaf children with cochlear implants.