Assessment of language comprehension of 6-year-old deaf children

Sixty-five 6-yr-old children from the New York State Schools for the Deaf were given the assessment of children's language comprehension (ACLC), administered orally and manually, along with a specially designed test of receptive language, the syntax screening test. The responses on the ACLC were analyzed according to selected word types. The test stimuli were analyzed and classified into a hierarchy of linguistic complexity to evaluate the children's comprehension of various linguistic structures. Results show that comprehension of word types (nouns, verbs, etc.) and linguistic structure can be orderly, producing a hierarchy of complexity similar to that found in normally hearing children. However, performance was about 3 yr behind that of normally hearing peers.