Longitudinal predictors of reading ability in children with CI learning to read in Swedish

This study investigated long-term predictors of reading development (phonological decoding, word recognition, and reading comprehension) in 24 children with cochlear implants (CIs).

The predictor variables were age, sex, nonverbal intelligence, working memory, paired associate learning, receptive vocabulary, phonological skills, grammatical knowledge, age at implantation, speech perception, and reported interest in reading. The children's mean age was approximately 7;8 years at the start of the study and they were then measured at three time points. The first and second assessments took place approximately 13 months apart, and the children were approximately 11;8 years of age at the third time point.

Decoding ability at age 11 was associated with early measures of nonverbal cognitive ability, visual-verbal paired associate learning, and grammatical knowledge when 0.05 was used as significance level but none of them remained significant after correcting for multiple comparisons. Several predictor variables from earlier measurements were significantly related to reading comprehension at age 11. The predictors that remained significant after Bonferroni correction were receptive vocabulary and grammatical knowledge.

The findings from this research suggest that early exposure to hearing and language, in particular vocabulary and grammar, is associated with reading outcomes at age 11.