An assessment of cognitive abilities in hearing and hearing-impaired preschool children

There have been many investigations of cognitive development in older hearing-impaired children, but few with preschool hearing-impaired children. The performance of 40 hearing and 40 hearing-impaired children of preschool age (2 1/2 to 5 1/2 years) was compared on five nonverbal cognitive tasks and three subtests from the Perceptual Performance subscale of the McCarthy Scales of Children's Abilities (1972). For this set of tasks there was a significant effect of age consistent with a developmental change. A one-way MANCOVA on all dependent measures with age as the covariate revealed no significant differences between the hearing-impaired and hearing children. The results suggest that despite a deficiency in language abilities, the cognitive development of young hearing-impaired children is comparable to that of hearing children of the same age.