The grammatical morpheme deficit in moderate hearing impairment.

Background: Much remains unknown about grammatical morpheme (GM) acquisition by children with moderate hearing impairment (HI) acquiring spoken English.

Aims: To investigate how moderate HI impacts on the use of GMs in speech and to provide an explanation for the pattern of findings.

Methods & Procedures: Elicited and spontaneous speech data were collected from children with moderate HI (n = 10; mean age = 7;4 years) and a control group of typically developing children (n = 10; mean age = 3;2 years) with equivalent mean length of utterance (MLU).