title: A preliminary account of phonological and morphophonological perception in young children with and without otitis media.
abstract: This investigation examined the effects of otitis media with effusion (OME) and its associated fluctuating conductive hearing loss on the perception of phonological and morphophonological /s/ and /z/ in young children. We predicted that children free of OME (OME-) would perform better than children with histories of OME (OME+). We also predicted that for the OME+ group morphological perception would be harder than phonological perception, because the former category carries an additional linguistic load (i.e., plurality). Sixteen children, ages 26 to 28 months (M = 26.5, SD = 0.6) were divided into two groups, the OME- (n = 8) and OME+ (n = 8) based on OME history during the first year of life. Subjects in the OME- group were free of the disease for 4/5 visits and pure tone average (PTA) was 12.6 dB HL (SD = 4.8). Subjects in the OME+ group had the disease on 3/5 visits and PTA was 23 dB HL (SD = 2.7). Experimental stimuli were six monosyllabic novel word-pairs. Members of each word-pair differed only in the presence of final voiced or voiceless fricative, marking the targets phonologically (e.g., [g [symbol: see text]]/[g [symbol: see text] s] as in 'law', 'loss') or morphophonologically (e.g., [daep]/[daeps] as in 'map' 'maps'). Subjects were taught the unfamiliar word pairs using a fast mapping procedure. Perception was tested with the bimodal preferential looking paradigm. Children in the OME- group performed significantly better than their OME+ counterparts. Individual word-pair analyses showed that OME+ group performed more poorly than the OME- group on one phonological and on two morphological targets, all ending with [s]. For the OME+ group, targets with final [s] posed greater difficulty than those with final [z], especially on morphophonological plural-(s) targets. The results suggested that the fluctuating hearing loss associated with OME might have a negative impact on speech perception.
authors.affiliation: City University of New York, USA. kpetinou@logos.cy.net
authors.forename: K C
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Petinou
authors.forename: R G
authors.initials: RG
authors.lastname: Schwartz
authors.forename: J S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Gravel
authors.forename: L J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Raphael
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D005500:Follow-Up Studies; D006314:Hearing Loss, Conductive / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010034:Otitis Media with Effusion / Q000150:complications / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010700:Phonetics; D013067:Speech Perception