Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 20, 2025
Systematic Hearing Performance Evaluation Process for Adolescents with Cochlear Implantation at Early Ages
Published on: March 24, 2023
The Contribution of Noun and Verb Lexicon Sizes to Later Grammatical Outcomes in Mandarin-Speaking Children With
Jianfen Luo1,2, Lei Xu1,2, Min Wang1,2
1Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Shandong Provincial ENT Hospital, Shandong University, Jinan, China.
Purpose:
The present study evaluated the applicability of the sentence-focused framework to Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) by examining the relative contribution of receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes to later grammatical complexity.
Method:
Participants were 51 Mandarin-speaking children who received cochlear implantation before 30 months of age. At 12 months after CI activation, parents were asked to endorse words that their child could understand only or understand and say using the infant version of the Early Vocabulary Inventory. At 24 months after CI activation, parents were asked to endorse the grammatical structures that their children were able to say using the Grammatical Complexity subtest in the Mandarin Communicative Development Inventory-Taiwan. Children's receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes and grammatical complexity scores were computed from these parent checklists.
Results:
Correlational analyses showed that children's receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes at 12 months after CI activation were all highly correlated with their grammatical complexity scores at 24 months after CI activation (ρs = .52-.63, ps < .001). Regression analyses further revealed that verb lexicon sizes at 12 months after CI activation outweighed noun lexicon sizes in accounting for grammatical complexity at 24 months after CI activation.
Conclusions:
Our findings supported the prediction of the sentence-focused framework. Emphasizing the role of verbs in early intervention has the potential to enhance grammatical outcomes in Mandarin-speaking children with CIs.
Supplemental Material:
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26129044.
Related Concept Videos
01:22Language Development
The critical period for language acquisition suggests that the ability to acquire language is at its peak early in life. As people age, this proficiency decreases. Language development begins very...
01:27Language and Cognition
01:10Higher Mental Functions of the Brain: Language
Language formation and comprehension take place in the dominant hemisphere. The dominant hemisphere is responsible for understanding the meaning of spoken, written, or sign language, as well as the ability to communicate. For most people, the left hemisphere is the dominant one. The right hemisphere, then, gives tone and emotional context to the...
01:28Lateralization
01:24Components of Language