A comparative study of speech development between deaf children with cochlear implants who have been educated with spoken or spoken+sign language.

Objective: To compare speech development following unilateral cochlear implant (CI) between a group of prelingually deaf children who have been educated exclusively using spoken language and another group who have used two languages (spoken and sign language).

Design: A simple group quasi-experimental design was used with a control group.

Methods: The sample comprised 7 girls and 11 boys, aged between 4 and 8 years old, who received a CI between the ages of 15 months and 5 years old. The sample was divided into two groups, G1-bilingual and G2-spoken language. In both groups, aspects such as speech intelligibility, receptive vocabulary, psycho-linguistic skills, adaptive behaviour and behavioural problems were measured.

Results: The children in Group 1 (bilingual) had better verbal and manual expression whereas those in Group 2 (spoken) achieved better results in terms of speech intelligibility, auditory reception and grammatical closure. These differences were confirmed statistically using Analysis of Variance. No significant differences were observed in relation to: receptive vocabulary, social and communicative skills, visual reception, auditory and visual association, visual closure and visual or auditory sequential memory.

Conclusion: The development of speech in these children is irrefutable; however, this study contributes a paradoxical element to the discussion: the bilingual group obtained better results in verbal fluency, hence these children should be able to evoke a greater number of words than those educated using just spoken language.