Morpho-syntactic reading comprehension in children with early and late cochlear implants.
This study explores morpho-syntactic reading comprehension in 19 Spanish children who received a cochlear implant (CI) before 24 months of age (early CI [e-CI]) and 19 Spanish children who received a CI after 24 months (late CI [l-CI]). They all were in primary school and were compared to a hearing control (HC) group of 19 children. Tests of perceptual reasoning, working memory, receptive vocabulary, and morpho-syntactic comprehension were used in the assessment. It was observed that while children with l-CI showed a delay, those with e-CI reached a level close to that which was obtained by their control peers in morpho-syntactic comprehension. Thus, results confirm a positive effect of early implantation on morpho-syntactic reading comprehension. Inflectional morphology and simple sentence comprehension were noted to be better in the e-CI group than in the l-CI group. The most important factor in distinguishing between the HC and l-CI groups or the e-CI and l-CI groups was verbal inflectional morphology.
Complutense University of Madrid, rlopezsa@psi.ucm.es.
Ramón
R
López-Higes
Complutense University of Madrid.
Carlos
C
Gallego
National Distance Education University, Laboratory of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience in the Centre for Biomedical Technology.
María Teresa
MT
Martín-Aragoneses
Complutense University of Madrid.
Natalia
N
Melle
D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D003054:Cochlear Implants; D032882:Comprehension; D003638:Deafness / Q000523:psychology* / Q000601:surgery; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007805:Language Development Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000534:rehabilitation; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading; D061665:Time-to-Treatment; D014825:Vocabulary