Comprehension and production of basic semantic concepts by older hearing-impaired children

Comprehension of semantic concepts considered basic to academic performance in the early grades was evaluated with the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts (BTBC) for 15 orally trained, severely and profoundly hearing-imparied children, ages 13--14 years. The children also were required to construct written sentences using these same concepts. Teachers of the hearing-impaired children completed a questionnaire of their expectation levels of the vocabulary competence, comprehension, and production for each child on the 50 items of the BTBC. Classroom texts used by the children were examined for the presence of these specific concepts. The measure of comprehension showed that four-fifths of the children scored lower than the 10th percentile for second-grade hearing children, and two-thirds scored at or below the 1st percentile. Evaluating production, 68% of the sentences produced by the children contained semantic, syntactic, or semantic-syntactic errors. The individual's level of vocabulary comprehension was higher than each child's level of production. Classroom teachers were able to predict accurately each child's comprehension and production scores. Finally, the survey of the classroom textbooks used by the children revealed that approximately 80% of the BTBC test items appeared within the texts. Implications are discussed.