Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics· 2026Q1
Multilevel narrative assessment in children with early cochlear implants compared to typically hearing peers
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- 2026year
Short summary
Children with early cochlear implants (CIs) show preserved productivity and grammar but reduced lexical diversity and informativeness in narratives compared to typically hearing peers.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Early CI users showed largely preserved narrative productivity and grammatical accuracy.
- Lexical diversity (range of words used) was significantly lower in early CI users.
- Informativeness (use of essential words) was also reduced in narratives from early CI users.
- CI children struggled particularly with function words like pronouns and clitics.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Cochlear implants (CIs) provide auditory access that supports the development of oral language in deaf children with severe-to-profound hearing loss, especially when implantation occurs early. This study assessed narrative abilities in 16 school-aged children with early CIs compared to 16 typically hearing peers matched for age, using a multilevel framework encompassing productivity, microlinguistic, and macrolinguistic measures. Results indicated that productivity and grammatical accuracy were largely preserved in early CI users. In contrast, lexical diversity (the range of different words used) and informativeness (words that contribute essential information to discourse) emerged as residual weaknesses, with CI children producing less varied and informative narratives, particularly in the use of function words such as pronouns and clitics. Overall, the findings reveal specific difficulties among CI users that can be clinically assessed and addressed through multilevel evaluation tasks.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Developmental and Educational PsychologyPsychology