The Relation Between Vocabulary Knowledge and Phonological Awareness in Children With Cochlear Implants

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this study was to evaluate the relation between lexical knowledge and phonological awareness performance of children with cochlear implants. Method Thirty children with cochlear implants (aged 5–7 years), 30 children with normal hearing matched for age, and 30 children with normal hearing matched for vocabulary size participated in the study. Children completed a vocabulary knowledge measure and three phonological awareness tasks with words that had high and low neighborhood density. Results Children with cochlear implants performed more poorly than their age-matched peers and similarly to their vocabulary-matched peers on phonological awareness tasks. When performance was analyzed according to the neighborhood density of the target word, children with cochlear implants and age-matched children performed better with high-density words. Across all groups, vocabulary size correlated significantly with phonological awareness performance. Conclusion Children with cochlear implants demonstrate delays in both vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness performance, but children with cochlear implants appear to take advantage of lexical information similarly to their age-matched peers.