Rhyme Awareness in Children With Normal Hearing and Children With Cochlear Implants: An Exploratory Study

Area of Science:

• Developmental Psychology
• Speech and Hearing Science
• Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

• Phonological awareness is crucial for literacy development, predicting decoding and spelling abilities.
• Children with hearing impairments often exhibit deficits in phonological awareness, impacting literacy.
• Cochlear implantation (CI) may improve speech and language, but its effect on phonological awareness needs more research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the association between rhyme awareness, vocabulary, and working memory in children with normal hearing (NH) and children with CI.
• To explore the influence of linguistic characteristics (rhyme neighborhood density, orthographic congruency) on rhyme awareness performance.
• To compare rhyme awareness abilities between NH children and children with CI.

Main Methods:

• A rhyme oddity task was administered to assess rhyme awareness.
• Vocabulary and working memory capacity were measured in both NH and CI groups.
• Linguistic features of task stimuli were analyzed for their potential impact on performance.

Main Results:

• In NH children, both vocabulary and working memory were significantly correlated with rhyme awareness.
• In CI children, only working memory showed a significant correlation with rhyme awareness.
• Linguistic characteristics of the task items did not significantly predict performance in either group.

Conclusions:

• Vocabulary and working memory are key factors supporting early phonological awareness in NH children.
• Working memory may play a particularly important role in rhyme awareness for children with CI.
• Future research should further explore interventions to enhance phonological awareness in CI users.