The phonological development in young hearing-impaired children with a cochlear implant

How well do hearing-impaired children speak after a Cochlear Implantation (CI) and how does their language acquisition proceed? The answer to these questions is inevitably that success depends on a number of factors: one of the critical factors is the age at implantation. In this paper we provide an overview of the phonological results of a longitudinal study of nine early-implanted Dutch speaking CI children. The youngest child was five months of age when implanted, the oldest child 19 months. Video recordings of spontaneous unstructured parent-child interactions were made on a monthly basis, from the month before the implantation up to 24 months after the surgery, and cross-sectionally at 3 and 4 years of age. The corpus was transcribed orthographically and phonemically, and detailed linguistic analyses were performed with regard to the sequence of segment acquisition. Additionally, a whole-word production measure of phonological proficiency, the PMLU (Ingram 2002), was applied.