Language sampling for children with and without cochlear implant: MLU, NDW, and NTW

Area of Science:

• Pediatric audiology
• Speech-language pathology
• Rehabilitative technology

Background:

• Cochlear implants (CIs) offer significant benefits for oral language development in prelingual children with hearing impairments.
• Research on CI outcomes in Persian-speaking populations is limited, necessitating specific investigations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare lexical diversity and syntactic complexity in Persian-speaking children with and without CIs.
• To assess the impact of CIs on language acquisition in a non-English speaking context.

Main Methods:

• A cross-sectional study involving 20 children with CIs and 20 typically developing children.
• Language samples collected through picture descriptions, with the first 50 utterances analyzed for each child.

Main Results:

• Significant differences in lexical diversity and syntactic complexity were observed between children with CIs and their typically developing peers.
• No significant differences were found when comparing children with CIs to typically developing children with similar hearing experience.

Conclusions:

• Cochlear implants are effective in enabling children to achieve speech and language abilities similar to their hearing peers.
• The duration of auditory experience post-implantation is a critical factor influencing speech and language development in children with CIs.