Narrative skills in Turkish-speaking children with hearing loss: a comparative analysis with normal-hearing peers

The assessment of narrative skills, which reflect higher-order language abilities, provides clear evidence of children's developmental progress and may predict later academic achievement and language development.

This study aimed to compare the narrative skills of children with hearing loss (HL) and those with normal hearing (NH).

The study group included of 27 children with HL and 27 children with NH aged 4-8 year. The Turkish Early Language Development Test (TEDIL) was used to evaluate children's early verbal language development, and the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument was used to assess narrative skills.

According to the results, TEDIL scores (p = 0.000, p = 0.001, and p = 0.000), mean length of utterance in words (MLUw; p = 0.014), and morphemes (MLUm; p = 0.004) in the A1 story were significantly lower in children with HL than in those with NH. Significant differences were also found between the two groups in A1 (p = 0.002) and A3 (p = 0.029) story structure scores, in favour of children with NH. Additionally, significant differences were observed in NDW (p = 0.039) and TNW (p = 0.004) in the A1 story for children with HL, and in MLUw (p = 0.046), TNW (p = 0.007), NDW (p = 0.002), and story structure (p = 0.006) in the A3 story for children with NH.

The findings indicate that children with HL perform more poorly in language and narrative skills than children with NH. In addition, it was found that children with HL showed greater difficulty in making inferences from the story and establishing cause and effect relationships within stories. These results suggest that educational programmes should be developed to assess and support the narrative skills of children with HL, enabling them to catch up with their NH peers.