title: The acquisition of grammatical and lexical structures in children with cochlear implants: a developmental psycholinguistic approach.
abstract: The acquisition of grammatical and lexical structures was studied in a sample of 10 young German-speaking children with cochlear implants (mean implantation age 2 years 3 months). Spontaneous speech samples were collected covering the first 18 months after first tune-up. At the end of this period, 8 children were able to produce two- or multi-word utterances. Furthermore, 8 children had acquired plural inflections on nouns, and 5 children had acquired a substantial portion of verb inflectional morphology. Children did less well acquiring case-marked articles, forms of the copula and modal verbs. Articles were acquired better when they functioned as pronouns. Children had good vocabularies (type/token ratios >/=0.25), and all but one child started language with a preference for content words as opposed to function words.
authors.affiliation: Institut für Kognitionsforschung, Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität, Oldenburg, Deutschland. szagun@psychologie.uni-oldenburg.de
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Szagun
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D003638:Deafness / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*