Inflectional morphology in German hearing-impaired children

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Speech-Language Pathology
• Developmental Psychology

Background:

• Children with hearing impairment face challenges in spoken language acquisition during critical developmental periods.
• Sensorineural hearing loss particularly impacts the perception of voiceless coronal consonants crucial for German grammar.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate production and acquisition difficulties of German inflectional suffixes in hearing-impaired children.
• To determine if phoneme perception deficits correlate with speech production challenges in this population.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments were conducted: an elicitation task and a picture-naming task.
• Participants included monolingual German children (aged 3-4 years) with hearing impairment.

Main Results:

• Difficulties in perceiving specific phonemes were observed in hearing-impaired children.
• These perception difficulties were linked to the avoidance of the same sounds in their speech production.
• The avoidance occurred regardless of the grammatical function of the phonemes.

Conclusions:

• Perceptual deficits in phoneme processing directly impact speech production in young German children with hearing impairment.
• Grammatical function does not mitigate the avoidance of difficult-to-perceive sounds.
• Early intervention focusing on phoneme perception may be crucial for language development in hearing-impaired children.