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Analysis of narrative ability in children with cochlear implants.
Ear and Hearing
|October 19, 2001
Summary
Developing a narrative scoring system, this study found that cochlear implant users with better speech perception skills produced more coherent stories. Narrative ability significantly predicts reading comprehension in deaf children.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric audiology
- Developmental psychology
- Educational psychology
Background:
- Assessing narrative ability is crucial for understanding child development.
- Cochlear implants (CIs) aim to improve auditory perception in deaf children.
- The impact of CIs on higher-level cognitive functions like narrative skills requires further investigation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and validate a scoring system for assessing narrative ability in children.
- To determine how auditory speech perception, influenced by cochlear implant use, affects narrative skill development.
- To establish the predictive relationship between narrative ability and reading comprehension in deaf children.
Main Methods:
- Elicited narrative stories from 8- and 9-year-old children (87 CI users, 28 normal hearing) using a picture sequence.
- Developed a narrative scoring system based on structure, conjunction use, and referential clarity.
- Compared narrative scores of CI users with normal-hearing peers and analyzed correlations with speech perception, IQ, language, and reading scores.
Main Results:
- Narrative ability scores significantly correlated with speech perception, language syntax, and reading scores in hearing-impaired children.
- Discourse-level narrative skills, alongside sentence-level skills, independently predicted reading comprehension.
- CI users with above-average speech perception demonstrated narrative structures and cohesion similar to normal-hearing children, unlike those with below-average perception.
Conclusions:
- Narrative ability is a significant predictor of reading comprehension in deaf children, independent of IQ and syntax.
- Early cochlear implantation (before age 5) coupled with above-average speech perception benefits leads to age-appropriate narrative skills by 8-9 years.
- The developed scoring system offers a valuable tool for assessing narrative competence and its impact on literacy in children with hearing impairments.