Some aspects of language development in normal-hearing children and children with cochlear implants

This article presents some important processes of normal child language acquisition and applies them to language acquisition data of children with cochlear implants.

Modern studies of language acquisition, covering various languages, have demonstrated a close link between linguistic and cognitive development. Sensorimotor intelligence provides a construction of reality on which the first grammatical structures are built, encoding a number of relations which hold between objects, persons, events, and localizations. When acquiring the more complex morphological and syntactic aspects of their mother-tongue, children use a number of characteristic information processing strategies which make some formal markings easier to learn than others. There is considerable variability across children with respect to rate of acquisition, the use of imitation, and analytic versus holistic processing strategies. Caregivers' language input can facilitate language acquisition, notably the use of expansions and reformulations, and a generally accepting style. EMPIRICAL STUDY OF CHILDREN WITH COCHLEAR IMPLANTS: Language acquisition data from two children with cochlear implants show great differences with respect to rate of acquisition, construction of the German case system, and syntax. Whereas one child discovers the regularities of the case inflectional system quickly, the other child appears to prefer holistic and rote learning processes and uses a sequential strategy for combining words. It is suggested that variability between children with cochlear implants may be due to different frequencies of actually processed linguistic items.

Future research should compare language development in children with cochlear implants and those with normal hearing making use of psycholinguistic methods of research design and analysis.