title: Inflectional morphology in German hearing-impaired children.
abstract: Despite modern hearing aids, children with hearing impairment often have only restricted access to spoken language input during the 'critical' years for language acquisition. Specifically, a sensorineural hearing impairment affects the perception of voiceless coronal consonants which realize verbal affixes in German. The aim of this study is to explore if German hearing-impaired children have problems in producing and/or acquiring inflectional suffixes expressed by such phonemes. The findings of two experiments (an elicitation task and a picture-naming task) conducted with a group of hearing-impaired monolingual German children (age 3-4 years) demonstrate that difficulties in perceiving specific phonemes relate to the avoidance of these same sounds in speech production independent of the grammatical function these phonemes have.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Rehabilitation and Special Education , University of Cologne , Germany.
authors.forename: Martina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Penke
authors.affiliation: a Department of Rehabilitation and Special Education , University of Cologne , Germany.|b Department of Inclusive and Special Needs Education (Developmental Speech and Language Disorders) , University of Bremen , Germany.
authors.forename: Eva
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Wimmer
authors.affiliation: b Department of Inclusive and Special Needs Education (Developmental Speech and Language Disorders) , University of Bremen , Germany.
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hennies
authors.affiliation: c Department for Voice , Speech and Hearing Disorders, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf , Hamburg , Germany.
authors.forename: Markus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hess
authors.affiliation: b Department of Inclusive and Special Needs Education (Developmental Speech and Language Disorders) , University of Bremen , Germany.
authors.forename: Monika
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rothweiler
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002652:Child Behavior; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D019988:Children with Disabilities / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D006319:Hearing Loss, Sensorineural / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019986:Persons with Hearing Disabilities / Q000523:psychology*; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014705:Verbal Behavior; D014825:Vocabulary; D014833:Voice Quality
keywords: Coronal obstruents; inflectional suffixes; language acquisition; morphology; nasals; phoneme production; phoneme reception; sensorineural hearing impairment; syllable structure; verbal agreement