Teaching Vocabulary to Improve Print Knowledge in Preschool Children with Hearing Loss.

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to examine evidence that (a) published measures may tap different categories of print knowledge and result in disparate findings in the literature, (b) concept vocabulary knowledge in children with hearing loss may exacerbate deficits in conceptual print knowledge, and (c) concept vocabulary can be taught via direct instruction for preschool children with hearing loss.

Method: In Study 1, an item analysis of published print knowledge measures was performed to determine the prevalence of concept vocabulary in test items. Additionally, the performance on a conceptual print knowledge measure was compared for preschool children with and without hearing loss. In Study 2, four preschool children participated in a multiple probe across behaviors treatment design to determine if concept vocabulary could be explicitly taught to children with hearing loss.

Results: Differences emerged in use of concept vocabulary on test items across the measures, which may explain disparate findings that have been reported in this area. Additionally, children with hearing loss performed lower than children with typical hearing on items that contained concept vocabulary but not on items that did not. Finally, we found initial evidence that direct instruction can improve concept vocabulary for children with hearing loss, and it might not be necessary to separately target each concept category.

Conclusion: This series of studies lays groundwork for future research confirming a connection between conceptual print knowledge and conceptual vocabulary knowledge, and offers evidence for intervention that could be used clinically to teach conceptual vocabulary.