Reading Outcomes in Elementary School–Age Children With Hearing Loss Who Use Listening and Spoken Language: A Preliminary Report

Abstract

PurposeThis study examined reading outcomes and a comprehensive set of linguistic and cognitive factors considered to be associated with reading outcomes in children with hearing loss who use hearing aids or cochlear implants.MethodSeventeen children with bilateral, prelingual hearing loss who use listening and spoken language and attended Grades 3–5 at a private oral school for the deaf participated in this study. Children were administered 13 subtests from norm-referenced tests pertaining to reading outcomes (reading comprehension and decoding), linguistic factors (vocabulary, background information, literal inferencing, nonliteral inferencing, and grammatical knowledge), and cognitive factors (verbal working memory, short-term memory, phonological short-term memory, and analytical reasoning).ResultsPerformance of children with hearing loss was within normal ranges when compared to the normative means on all factors assessed except for nonword repetition. Furthermore, the performance of children with cochlear implants was comparable to that of the hearing aid users on all measures except for nonword repetition. Decoding was positively correlated with grammatical knowledge, analytical reasoning, and nonword repetition, whereas reading comprehension was positively correlated with grammatical knowledge, analytical reasoning, and inferencing.ConclusionsPreliminary findings from this study suggest that elementary school–age children with hearing loss demonstrated positive outcomes with respect to reading outcomes and other factors assessed except for the nonword repetition task. Findings suggest that a nonword repetition task may be used to flag children with hearing loss who may experience difficulties with decoding. Given that grammatical knowledge and analytical reasoning showed moderate-to-moderately strong correlation with both reading outcome measures, it is recommended that multicomponent reading intervention programs for elementary school–age children with hearing loss incorporate explicit instruction in these domains.